J. H. Sked Page 3

  The rest of the night was bedlam. The fire department turned up and made sure the blaze didn't spread, but I had a bad time talking the paramedics out of carting me off to hospital. Hospitals like doing blood tests. I have no inclination to end up in a lab for the rest of my life.

  Astrid ended up doing some vampire mojo thing to get me out of it. Not something she likes doing, and it tires her out, but it was either that or end up with me strapped to a gurney.

  We managed to trace most of what Susan had done. She got the recipe and ingredients for the hex bags off the internet, and bought the salt the same way. On-line shopping at it's most convenient.

  The nights Ruth thought she was out hunting she was – but she was also tracking down the coven members. We found out later that she placed over thirty hex bags in different types of transportation; everything from cars to motorcycles to a ten-speed bike.

  The lady was thorough, and very determined.

  Then she went to the house; laid the salt down and went inside.

  I wonder how long she sat there, after she'd turned on the gas in the kitchen. The house was a two storey, so it would have taken a while. I imagine she propped open the door to the basement so the gas would circulate as well, although Astrid told me the fire department found what was left of an empty propane tank standing on the stairs.

  They also found eight bodies buried under the floor. What was left of the washing machine was embedded in the wall. Like the explosion had flung it there – or it was trying to break through to escape what was coming.

  So Susan turned on the gas, and lugged a propane tank onto the stairs and opened the valve, and when it was empty she walked down the stairs, sat down on the floor, and lit a cigarette. I imagine she was smiling when she did so.

  Salt and fire, Mike said, and Susan Armstrong heard him.

  I never realized when I hit the speaker button that I'd muted their side of the call instead of ending it.

  Thirteen

  I got a letter at the office a couple of days later.

  "Dear Billy,

  I must apologise for the mess I've undoubtedly caused. I know that you were never aware of who I was before my current unfortunate condition. It isn't really important now, but I was - am - extremely wealthy. I would give up every last cent to not be what I am. I was never a saint, but neither did I deserve this.

  In a couple of weeks I will be nothing more than a shambling, hungry pile of bones and rotted meat. It is painful physically. It is more painful to think that I will no longer be able to control myself, that I will be a monster as bad as the one I intend to destroy for good tonight.

  I appreciate the help you and your colleagues have given me. Please tell Ruth that the kindness she showed was the best thing about this whole awful mess.

  I've done my best to make sure no-one else gets hurt. This ends now, and I am so very, very glad to be done with it.

  Regards

  Susan

  PS: Check your bank account."

  I'll never tell my partners this, but I put my head on my desk and cried. I cried for a woman who had been strong, and determined, and who would, I think, have been a good friend.

  Then I checked the bank account, and spat good filter coffee all over my keyboard. If I wanted to, I'd never have to work again. Hell, if I wanted to, I could buy a small tropical island.

  I pulled out my somewhat battered phone and looked at the last text message Susan ever sent me. The one that came through as I was learning to fly last Saturday night.

  Use it well. xx

  So we did.

  The Armstrong division of the Blue Moon detective agency concentrates solely on supernatural problems. We have a nice new building, underground parking and a canteen, and we're open twenty four hours a day.

  Call us any time.

  Dim

  One

  Charlie edged closer to the hallway, while Nana hissed into the telephone like an outraged goose.

  “This isn’t fair, Chrissie! This isn’t fair and isn’t right and you know-“

  It took some time to cross in front of the doorway of the sitting room, because the room was very dark and quiet and he’d have to put his hand through the puddle of darkness to touch the light switch, and he didn’t have any breath left to hold.

  “That’s no excuse – it was something else last week, and something else the week before!”

  Nana was mad.

  He knew why, had known as soon as he heard the soft burp of the telephone from his room, where he’d been carefully covering all the dark colours in his new books with white crayon.

  The ring had echoed around the quiet house in bands of harsh blue light and he knew.

  Chrissie wasn’t coming.

  “He needs his medication!”Nana’s voice rose into a wail.

  Charlie stood very still, forgetting to pant from the climb down the stairs. Medication the way Nana said it was green glass bottles falling, one by one, to shatter on a steel floor.

  He didn’t like the way medication sounded. Mad was better, being short and dumpy and warm, like the sticky buns Nana bought when her pension cheque came through.

  “I can’t take him,” Nana sighed, heavy and old and tired, into the mouthpiece. “I’m on oxygen ten hours a day now.” She flicked her eyes to the empty tanks, lurking beside the front door. “Today’s the day they bring the new batch.” She paused. “He’ll have to go by himself.”

  Charlie wedged his shoulders against the opposite wall, and sidled cautiously past the gaping mouth of the room. The red runner carpet undulated out of the dimness within, a dry and dusty tongue.

  Danny sat cross-legged on the carpet, and raised a hand in casual salute. The strap of his helmet was undone, dangling casually beneath his chin, his eyes copper coins in the semi-light.

  His face was hardly marked at all.

  “Hey Charlie,” he said. “Want to play a game?”

  Charlie slammed his eyes closed, holding what little breath he had saved until he heard the faint popping noise of Danny leaving, the mild boom as air rushed in to fill a sudden vacuum.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the darker patch of red, closer to maroon, where Danny had been, then resumed his journey towards the relative safety of the hallway light.

  He could hear Chrissie’s voice now, spiking harsh and orange into the inch of space between the receiver and Nana’s ear.

  “Well, he can’t take the bus.”

  “I know, Chrissie.”

  “A taxi would –“

  “Cost money I don’t have,” Nana shook her head at the mouthpiece, darted a look at the tanks, and began fishing in the pocket of her housedress.

  She knew she shouldn’t, as she pulled the crumpled little packet out, and extracted the slim white tube, but talking to her granddaughter had this effect on her.

  “You know what happened when we went on – Nana? Are you smoking?”

  “No,” Nana carefully exhaled away from the telephone, feeling the first warning tickle in the back of her throat. “Look, I’ll sort something out. Not that you’re that bothered about it!” She slammed the receiver down, and glared at it.

  Charlie watched the cord curl up slowly, like a wounded snake, and heard the long slow hiss as Nana took another drag on her cigarette.

  “Bugger,” she muttered through a mouthful of smoke, and her outraged lungs closed up almost entirely. She stubbed the cigarette out hastily in the small ceramic ashtray beside the ‘phone, then held on to the side of the table as she began to cough, a harsh, breathless cawing that shook her slight frame.

  “Nana?” Charlie trotted anxiously over to over, bending so that his six foot four frame didn’t disturb the new light fitting dangling low from the hallway ceiling, and placed a large and slightly grubby hand on her shoulder.

  “Nana hurt?” He waited, mouthing the word to himself again, liking the way it purred out of his mouth like a friendly cat.

  Huurrtt. Huuurrrt..

  Nana strai
ghtened up as the coughing lessened, feeling her old heart galloping in the coral of her ribcage, and patted Charlie’s hand reassuringly.

  “Not hurt, lad. Just stupid, is all.”

  “Stee-yuu-pid,” Charlie smiled, tasting the word as it pulled through his teeth. “Like toffee.”

  “Yes, Charlie. Help me back to my chair, there’s a good boy.”Nana dabbed at her lips with the sleeve of her cardigan, and pretended not to see the dark streaks left against the wool.

  Charlie lifted her gleefully and carried her over to the old velveteen covered rocker, sulking in the lounge corner beside the empty space for the new tanks. He loved carrying Nana; it meant she thought he was a big help.

  He lowered her carefully and prepared to fuss over tucking the blanket around her legs, smooth and tidy.

  “Never mind that, Charlie,” she tapped him sharply on the shoulder, and he looked at her, lower lip trembling.

  Creases were bad; creases let shadow and dark spill over Nana’s legs, and she would sit in knotty dimness until the material was smoothed.

  “Oh, all right, then,” she sighed, and rested a hand fondly on his dark head while he tugged and straightened and smoothed. “All done?”

  He nodded solemnly.

  “Now you heard me on the ‘phone with Chrissie, so you know..” she sighed and looked away. “Your sister can’t take you to the hospital today, Charlie.”

  “Chrissie don’t like the funny farm,” he agreed, smiling, so she wouldn’t know he wanted to cry. He hadn’t seen her for so long, and Chrissie had golden hair and soft blue eyes and always wore soft pastel colours to set off her fair skin.

  Chrissie was light.

  Nana leant forward and gripped his hand, tightly. “It’s not a farm, Charlie. Farms are for animals. It’s a hospital.”

  Charlie liked the idea of the hospital populated with animals, scurrying about their business on four legs instead of two.

  The nurses would be geese, hissing at alarms and patrolling the in-patient wards, the doctors who strolled amongst the lesser mortals the majestic bulls that ruled the farmyard.

  The patients.. the patients could be anything.

  “Could I be a squirrel?”

  Chrissie had told him once that he had nuts in the attic, but he’d gone upstairs to look and hadn’t found any. Maybe if he were a squirrel, he’d find them.

  “What? Charlie, listen to me, please.”

  He smiled at her again and nodded, and Nana squeezed his hand once more.

  “You need to go to the hospital by yourself today, Charlie.” The mild green eyes grew round and wide.

  “By myself?” He whispered. “But Chrissie says I can’t do it. Says I’m use-“

  “No!” She lowered her voice, suddenly struggling to contain her temper. Charlie wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t directed at him; he responded to emotion, not the reason behind it.

  “You can do it, Charlie. You’re my big, strong lad aren’t you?”

  He nodded, still unsure, but wanting to please.

  “Now go to the little table next to my bed, and bring me –“ she stopped. If she confused him, he’d stand and stare at the drawer until she called him, and she wasn’t as good at giving precise instructions as she once was.

  “Bring me the drawer, please Charlie.” She gave the big hand a final, comforting pat and released it.

  “Drawer,” he said, smiling again, and nodded.

  “There’s a lad,” she murmured, and waited for him to trot out of the room before scowling into the middle distance. “If you were here Missy, you’d get such a slap!”

  She felt the bitter throb of memory, like an aching tooth in her heart. An abscess of dreams ruined by stupid luck and a fragment of mortar, and the bright young soldier had been returned to her like a defective toy.

  The army had wound him up and told him to march, had placed a rifle in his hands and sent him into the desert.

  She had braced herself for the telegram she’d expected daily, the offensive flimsy she remembered from her girlhood that ticked off loss as coldly as a shopping list: father, brother, lover, friend.

  Nobody talked about a friendly bomb that could do damage, that allies could destroy as effectively as any enemies, that the lone survivor of a convoy could return home vaguely aware that something was missing, but without realizing that it was a good portion of his reasoning brain. Friendly fire was the ultimate oxymoron.

  The doctors had said he could function on about the same level as an six-year old in most things, and six-year olds got along fine in many ways. Including catching the bus, or -at a stretch -the tube, if it came to that.

  But most six-year olds hadn’t spent nearly two days trapped in the dark of an over-turned and half-buried truck, half-suffocated by the bodies of their comrades, mouth sealed by blood and crumpled bone that denied them even the release of screaming.

  Charlie’s intense dislike of dark places was part of the poison fruit reaped by their little family, even if he’d no memory of the cause, and she had the solution to that in her drawer, next to the travel pass.

  She flicked her eyes over to the empty space beside her chair. It wouldn’t be much longer before she’d need full-time care herself, and she knew that Chrissie would blithely stick her into the nearest – and cheapest – home she could find.

  She could bear that; she had lived for too many years with the full knowledge of her younger grandchild’s all-encompassing selfishness to be disillusioned now; could even acknowledge her own responsibility in not weeding it out of the child when she took them in, more than thirty years ago.

  But Charlie – how would her wounded chick survive, ripped from the only nest he’d ever known, dumped in amongst strangers who wouldn’t know or care about the sweetness that hid under the giant, bumbling frame?

  “He won’t,” she said out loud to the empty room. All they’d see was an unnervingly huge retarded man, with a dent in his head large enough to hold a tennis ball and fine veil of scar tissue draping his temple; a leviathan who fell over his own feet because he couldn’t tread on shadows.

  She’d seen how people responded to that, from the pointing and sniggering in the supermarket to the outright vicious teasing.

  Charlie stepped carefully back into the room, the fragile rosewood of the drawer cradled carefully in his arms.

  “Drawer!” he told her proudly. It had taken her awhile to understand that what he said took second place to what he meant, but she’d gotten the hang of it years ago. Chrissie never had.

  “Drawer, Nana!”

  “Very good,” she smiled. “Now bring it here, Charlie, and let me show you what we have.”

  Two

  One hour later, freshly bathed and dressed, hair still damp and neatly combed beneath the soft blue woollen cap, Charlie stepped out of the front door.

  He stood there for a moment, a large, broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair already rebelling from its careful grooming, with one large hand still holding the door slightly ajar as he inhaled the crisp November air.

  At ten o’clock in the morning, the cloying stench of exhausts and fried rubber already hung over the city, and by the time he got home, the corners of his eyes and the rims of his nostrils would be coated by the thick black muck that Londoners breathed in on a daily basis.

  Charlie exhaled, his breath a white twist that clung briefly to his mouth before dispersing, and groped with his free hand at the address card, carefully printed in Nana’s shaky hand, and tied around his neck with a piece of string.

  His Donald Duck pouch fixed firmly over his chest – if he wore it on his back someone always tried to pull it off - he slid his fingers away from the door, feeling the slipperiness in the paint that warned of rain later in the day.

  He dropped his hand to his side and listened to the snick of the door catching with a sharp silver finality, and after a spell of consideration – it sounded very like the noise Nana’s big-handled scissors made when she cut his hair - bega
n the long and painful journey up the street.

  He walked slowly, because the spacing on the pavement was uneven, and if he was careless he would step on the inky shadows that oozed between the slabs, seeking his feet with clumsy fingers

  Chrissie hadn’t understood when he tried to tell her what was so bad about the blackness, of how it made him feel dim when it touched him. Dim was bad, dim was feeling brightness drain away in a dizzying swirl of hurt and loud voices.

  Nana never spoke about it, but he thought she knew, anyway. Nana was aging – it seemed he could hear it sometimes, like the creaking of an old oak preparing to uproot itself – and he had seen the knowledge of blackness in her eyes lately, even if he didn’t have the words to describe it to her.