The Last Days of Jack Sparks (35 page)

‘Bex had nothing to do with this,’ I growl, fighting myself into my shoes, keeping the blood and hair on my feet. ‘It’s me Maria wants.’ I roar into the ether: ‘It’s me you want!’

Someone thumps on the wall from an adjoining room, and I scream abuse back.

‘Jack . . .’

It’s that voice again. The whispering voice that leads to the basement.

‘Do you hear that?’ I demand of Sherilyn. ‘My name being whispered?’

Spraying plug sockets, she just shakes her head.

‘Jack . . .’ says the voice.

I’m up on my feet, then out the door, marching through corridors, propelled by rage. Sherilyn calls after me, wanting to know where I’m heading. The basement? If so, she says, I have to wait. She needs more time to prepare.

As the lift doors close on me, I yell at her not to follow.

A breathless Sherilyn finds me at reception. I’m pointing across the foyer to the basement entrance door and ordering some designer-stubbled guy, not Brandon this time, to give me the key. Stubble Guy blanches and reddens, then snatches up a landline handset and hits one number. Then he tries another extension and says into the phone, ‘Ruthie, where
is
Howitz?’

I reach over the desk, grab the handset and slam it back on to the cradle in a jumble of curly cord.

‘Out, or I call the cops,’ Stubble Guy says.

‘Hey!’ comes the cry from some night owl across the foyer. This anvil-headed thirty-stone black guy leaves his sofa. As he strides towards us, he looks twice as big thanks to his reflection in the polished floor.

While all this is going on, of course, a disembodied voice still whispers my name.

Sherilyn eyeballs the approaching vigilante, while easing a cosh out of the lining of her small backpack. ‘Come on, fellas. No one wants this to get ugly.’

Balling his fists up tight by his sides, Stubble Guy doesn’t even blink. ‘You need to leave right now.’

I yank my T-shirt up and bunch it around my neck so Stubble Guy can see my ruined torso. All those Band-Aids stained pink from blood, green from pus. All the places where dressings have fallen off, revealing testimonials to a sick mind.

Fishing a key out from under the desk, Stubble Guy hands it over the same way he’d dish out a quarter to pacify some raving street loon.

Sherilyn slides the cosh back into its secret compartment.

Flickering bulbs test my nerve as we prowl the service corridor, down where the air gets warmer and wetter. The beckoning voice has fallen silent.

This burning anger feels useful. So much easier to get to grips with than, for example, massive grief or unbearable loss.

‘Had to leave half my bloody stuff upstairs,’ Sherilyn grouses.

‘I told you not to follow me,’ I say. ‘I just want this over with. Something wants me to come down here, and it sounds like Maria’s voice.’

‘I can’t just let you hand yourself over, Jack.’

The darker these passageways become, the more fear saps my resolve. I dip into my pocket where the Zippo usually sits, only to find it empty. I stop walking, not knowing what to do or say.

Sherilyn jerks her head around. Feline, alert. She utters a migraine moan, then shoos something invisible away with one hand.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask her.

‘Just got a psychic strike.’

Standing beside me, Sherilyn is a silhouette, profiled by limited light from the main boiler area up ahead. The sudden cold feels unnatural: an abrupt change of season. This time I can’t blame the Paranormals’ equipment. My God, what if they really didn’t make that video? It’s strangely comforting to touch the rough, sweaty surface of the nearest wall.

‘What’s a psychic strike?’ I ask her.

‘Whatever this thing is, it knows it’s got company. Probably detects me, so it’s lashing out. So you’re gonna stay here while I secure the area. No arguments.’

I agree way too fast. Like she said during the ego-purging ritual, I’m a coward. I totally wanted her to follow me down here.

From her backpack, Sherilyn takes the aerosol, some kind of figurine and a zipper bag of something. Handing me the surprisingly heavy pack, she says, ‘Hold this for me and don’t move.’

I fight the dread as her clomping footsteps become taps, then barely audible clicks, which merge with the generator hum as she disappears around that internet-famous corner.

I’m waiting in darkness.

My hand goes to that Zippo pocket again.

Waiting in darkness.

It pointlessly explores that empty pocket.

Waiting in darkness.

My heartbeat is improvised jazz played with gong hammers.

Then I remember what’s in the other pocket. A crumpled piece of paper . . . wrapped around my phone.

Waiting in darkness
.

I pull out the phone and unlock it. I bathe in the feeble blue light while glancing skittishly around in case it reveals something terrible.

Sherilyn gave me this sheet of Air New Zealand notepaper upstairs, before hell rose up from the sewers. I unfold it by phone-light, struggling to remember what it was even supposed to be.

This is what she wrote:

ADRA
ME
LECH

ME
PHISTOPHELES

BAPHO
ME
T

Sherilyn’s voice comes back along the passageway whip-crack loud, stern as a lion tamer. ‘Oh, no-no-no. Stay back. You stay back or you’ll get some of this.’

When she speaks again, she’s muffled and under duress. The sudden fear in her voice tightens my skin.

There’s the dull sound of something or someone hitting the ground.

‘Sherilyn?’ I call. ‘Sherilyn, are you all right?’

No reply.

The generator drones on.

I so badly want to run. Yes, run like my dad did. Run like I always do. But this woman travelled across the world to save me, even if she insisted it was really to save herself.

No matter how counter-intuitive it might be, I shrug on Sherilyn’s backpack, then force myself to walk towards the boiler room. I might be acting brave, but my lungs hitch when I try to call Sherilyn’s name again. Best to let them focus on breath. As long as they’re firing white mist out in front of me, I’m alive.

I start filming with my phone. If there really is a ghost, I want the whole world to see. For once in my life, I want, need to achieve something positive. Maybe this thing will defy photography like Mimi did, but I have to try. So I’m edging along the wall with the pipes, approaching that corner, heart pulsing in my mouth. Every single part of me feels heavier, more solid than it should.

If this ghost is waiting around the corner for me, I may as well confound its expectations. So I crouch and crawl. As I do this, something knocks on the door between my unconscious and conscious minds.

I slowly extend my phone around the bend, down low, millimetre by millimetre, then carefully follow it with my head so that I can see the screen.

I gasp.
How is this possible?

Across this open area, Sherilyn Chastain lies prone on the ground. I can’t see much of her, thanks to all those heavy shadows, but I know it’s her.

I know all of this.

All of it.

Standing over her is a dark humanoid figure, facing away from me. This figure fades slowly in and out of view.

Only its bottom half is visible on my screen.

I look past the phone at the scene itself, as if to confirm this insanity.

At first I tell myself this is just history repeating itself.

But I know the truth. Oh yes, I know.

‘Oh God,’ I whisper. ‘
This is it
.’

I am Camera Boy.

I duck back around the corner with a spine full of ice, keeping half of that terrible scene in frame – the exact same terrible scene I’ve witnessed hundreds of times before, along with a million other people.

This is too much to take. It’s bending my head and I have to get out of here. Bravery crumbles and the survival instinct kicks in, telling me to move.

The viewfinder shows that the dark figure is now facing me. It must have slowly turned around while I was freaking out. Of course it did. I know this off by heart.

I can’t see the figure’s face and now I really, really don’t want to.

As I scramble backwards away from that corner on my arse, I know what’s next.

Jesus Christ, it’s coming for me.

The sheer inevitability only makes it worse.

The figure glides fast around the corner, heading right for me, black feet hanging.

As I haul myself upright, a scream catches in my dust-dry throat.

The spectre’s face is charred and cracked. The mouth a skeletal grimace.

Oh, but the eyes. Oh God, those eyes, full of torture. Dragged along for the ride whether they want to be here or not.

This is not just a grotesque parody of my own face.

It
is
my face.

Of course it is.

I half expect to find myself glued to the ground, like in all the best nightmares. Instead, gazelle legs launch me into action.

And I’m running through darkness, beneath bulbs that have finally given up.

I’m crashing into walls I don’t remember and can’t foresee.

I don’t hear the spectre, but I know it’s there. Flitting behind me.

Soundless, deathless.

I fall on to the staircase that leads up to the foyer. I scramble up these steps on all fours, thinking nothing of the splinters gouging my hands.

Please, please, just let me get back up into the light. What can this thing do to me up there, where there’s people and life and open space?

‘Don’t go in there,’ rasps a sick version of my voice from behind me.

I glance back and see my dead self coming up the stairs.

I see the whites of my dead eyes.

Blind in the dark, I slam into the closed door and mount a crazed fumble for the handle. I’m fully aware that if some prick’s locked the door, then I’ll die, either by my own ghost’s hands or through cardiac arrest.

‘Don’t go in there,’ my voice repeats, close, so close.

Dead breath frosts the nape of my neck.

I heave open the door and swing myself through it, rocked by a head rush and an intense flash of red light.

I slam the door behind me, but I’m not standing in the corridor back to the hotel lobby. I’m in total fucking darkness.

All aboard the ghost train.

I keep hold of the door handle, as if a phantom couldn’t glide through solid wood if it chose to do so.

I pray for help, for light.

This door handle feels different. It used to be metal, but now it’s wood. And it feels overwhelmingly familiar. The shape of it, the grooves . . .

Please, please, please . . . if there’s any kind of God, then
let there be light
.

Nearby, a metallic clink and grind.

A tiny flame erupts.

I think my prayer has been answered, until I see the side of a young boy’s face.

The boy clutches a burning Zippo lighter, trembling so much he’s a blur. The dancing flame highlights tears rolling down his cheeks.

In this cramped space, I see the coats hanging right beside him. One of which he has set on fire.

‘Jacob?’ says Alistair, his muffled voice coming through the door I just entered. ‘Stop winding me up, you ugly little shit
.
’
¹

Rooted to the spot, seeing my open mouth reflected in the shiny new brass of the Zippo, I silently
will
my five-year-old self not to sense my presence.

But of course, the boy’s eyes dart this way, as far as they can go.

And he whimpers.

It’s inevitable.

The boy so wants to be brave. He wants to turn and face the unknown. He’s desperate to look and see nothing at all, so that everything will be fine.

Yet he can’t move a muscle and he’s wetting himself.

Because he knows damn well he sees me in the corner of his eye.

This moment will scar him forever. It will drive him to smother all doubt. To bury so much as the possibility that he saw something in this room.

Quite apart from the fear, he wouldn’t want to give his brother the satisfaction.

As I step forward to hug this boy, a green explosion blinds me.

1
An entirely fabricated quote –
Alistair
.

Cold soil devours my body temperature. Blades of grass squash themselves against the side of my face. Birds chirp and sing.

Hands, my hands, are wrapped around my head, shielding me from sunlight. Sherilyn’s backpack forms a protective shell.

It feels so safe to remain foetal, blind and still. Seeing and feeling are overrated.

Yet my brain is a relentless angle-grinder, sparking questions.

How was it possible for me to meet my own ghost in a basement?

How was it possible for me to film a video I’d first seen twenty days beforehand? (I’m sorry, Paranormals, so very sorry, for accusing you of making a video I was somehow destined to make myself. And I’m even sorrier, Sherilyn, for leaving you down there.)

And how in the blue caterwauling fuck was it possible for the presence my young self glimpsed in that Suffolk cloakroom to have been my adult self?

Images parade before my mind’s eye. Terrible iterations of me. My face on the shrieking airborne Mimi. My face on the charred basement spectre. My face on a traumatised child then known as Jacob.

Jacob Titherley, my birth name.

I withheld one detail about Maria Corvi. About her parting shot to me in Italy via that bastard Bonelli’s mouth. She didn’t say, ‘Hey, Jack Sparks. Enjoy your journey.’ No, that would have been too simple, too easy. She said, ‘Hey,
Jacob Titherley.
’

All the abominable events since, I realise, have been about me. Someone, or something, has said: ‘You want it to be all about you?
Coming right up
.’

‘Me’, hidden in the three words on the video that only I could hear.