Chapter Three
Henry heard the voice over and over again, squirming around in his head. It pressed up against the inside of his skull like a larva feeding and growing. He had no way of tracking the source of the voice.
He was investigating a property investor whose money had come from drug trafficking, when he started coming across bodies of women. They all had something missing. An estate agent whose stomach had been removed, a party girl found behind a club without a tongue or eyes. Henry knew the voice had done this, and inside his head it bulged and pulsed, and he knew he had to stop it.
He was searching an area where another girl went missing, a teenager who had vanished between the fast food restaurant where she worked and her home, when he saw a skinny man with oversized sunglasses. His black hair was thin on his scalp, brushed back and oily. He walked oddly as though he had three knees in each leg, more of a jerk and a twitch than a stride; as if constructed from scrawls in a child’s flip-book. Yet no-one else seemed to notice him, he moved unseen; sliding in and out of the city’s gaps without drawing a look.
Henry followed him to the docklands. This was the city’s forgotten dream, an abandoned beginning, where the houses stood like old broken promises. Some buildings slumped against each other like starved prisoners, chained together and close to death; others crumbled into the ground, collapsed into their hollow selves.
Henry followed, watching the man’s strange movements, and every jerky step he saw loosened something inside him, like a screw unwinding at the front of his brain. Colours bled from their outlines as he saw the odd man push open a door of a derelict house and go inside.
As soon as he pushed open the door Henry covered his mouth and nose, but it was too late, a sharp rotting smell hit him hard. Tears streamed down his face and he gagged and heaved as his stomach turned.
The strange figure disappeared down a dark stairwell, and Henry followed. His skin was stinging from the stench as he crept down to the basement. As he crouched at the bottom of the old stone steps in the shadow of the doorway and watched, he felt his insides freeze over.
A single light bulb hung from the damp ceiling, casting a pus-hued light onto the stone walls and the cold stone floor. In the middle of the room several bodies were piled in a heap. They were all naked. He saw the face of a young girl, eyes closed at peace, and mouth open in an eternal scream, but it was hard to tell what it was connected to, the bodies were dismembered and jumbled together.
Henry held his breath as with sharp, spasming steps the bizarre man circled the gruesome heap. Squeezed organs and entrails oozed and leaked, lank clumps and strands of different coloured hair sprouted and hung from the tangle of limbs, wounds, blood, shadows, hands, bruises.
Every instinct within Henry told him to run, to get as far away as possible from this horror. His stomach heaved, sending waves of gripping cold through him. His eyes burned. He backed away. The man then started to undress.
Henry froze.
Like a nightmare slowly opening, he watched as thin hands with fingers like gnarled roots peeled clothes off, and grey skin fell in loose creases on the skeletal frame. His limbs were too long. His torso was the size of a child’s, with a tiny ribcage and a distended belly, the one place where his smoky skin was tight. Where his navel should be was a nipple, sticking out like an arrowhead, and leaking drips of yellow sticky pus. Between his legs a lumpy growth hung like a rotten piece of fruit. His neck, thin like the stalk of a plant, bowed under the weight of his oversized head. His mouth was small and perfectly circular. He stood there in the cold yellow light, a hideous distortion of the human form, naked but for his big sunglasses, and when he took them off Henry saw the eyes of a fly.
Then he crawled onto the dead bodies. He pushed his face into the bodies to feed. He chewed in a frenzy, violently, his head shaking as he pushed deeper. Henry backed away again, feeling behind him for the steps. The Fly Guy lifted his skinny neck from the broken and open chest of a bleach-blonde girl, turned his head, and looked directly at Henry. It was a pale face that was spattered with blood and skin, its mouth like a vicious O with tiny razor sharp teeth, and its eyes, black domes separated into hundreds of tiny circles, flecked with spots of blood.
It spoke, and Henry felt the voice inside him again.
“Sssstop me. Bloomburg. Sssstop me.”
Terror overtook Henry; a screaming lightning bolt through his brain, and he turned and fled.
Henry didn’t sleep that night. The horror turned and twisted within him. His heart raced, and he rolled and wrapped the sheets around him. Soon they were damp with sweat.
As soon as light soaked through his curtains, he dressed and returned to the derelict house. But there was no house. There in front of him was an old parking lot, where weeds and tendrils reached up from the cracks in the concrete, like hands reaching up from an urban grave. He walked up and down the desolate street, searched for the house, the door through which he had followed The Fly Guy, but could not find it.
That day and the next he searched. He scanned the papers and police radio for reports of missing or murdered girls, but there was nothing. Henry drove back to the docklands again and again.
He began to lose confidence in the reality of this creature. Henry hadn’t seen anyone cast a glance to this weird misshapen man in their midst. Was he the only one to see it? Henry couldn’t decide which scared him more, the monster being real, or the monster existing only inside him.
Day after day he waited for The Fly Guy to reappear. No new cases came in. He wandered around the city, looking into windows, standing on street corners, until he gradually began to fade into the city.
* * *
Martin was frustrated by the way the story just dissolved.
When Alison got home, she found him sitting at the table in front of his laptop holding his hands behind his head as if surrendering. By now he spent all of his time at her table. Where she used to put bills, there was now a pile of newspapers and dog-eared property magazines with red and orange circles around apartments and houses big enough for two. On the corkboard next to pictures of her parents was the first check he received from Noire and Martin’s favourite bits of feedback from fans of Henry Bloomburg. A man in Budapest said the stories were nightmarish parables. A woman in Burnley wanted to take Henry home and give him something of her own to investigate. A man in Detroit had read “The Puppet Master” at the hospital bed of his comatose lover who opened his eyes for the first time since an accident six weeks previously just as Henry witnessed the puppets come to life.
Alison put her bag and a bundle of magazines and folders on the counter and switched on the kettle.
“Having problems?”
“Hi, babe. I just don’t know if this story is finished or not.”
“Is it long enough to send?” She hung up her jacket and took off her shoes, rubbing the soles of her feet and her heels. All day she had been walking around properties, showing clients around big old city houses with high ceilings and kitchens the size of her apartment.
“Yeah. I guess … it’s long enough. I don’t think it’s finished, but yeah, it’s long enough.”
“Send it then. It can always be the first part of something. How long have you been sitting in front of it?”
“All day.”
“Press send, sweetie.”
Martin attached it and sent it to Noire. He got up from the table and went over to her, putting his arms around her waist.
“I didn’t get dinner ready again, sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay, let’s get something on now, I’m starving.”
“Why don’t you come into ICE tonight? To keep me company? It’s such a drag.”
“Won’t Ozzy be working?”
“Yeah, but it’s still a real drag of a job.”
“Martin, I’m tired, I don’t want to sit in ICE while you and Ozzy work.”
“Call your friends, come on.”
She broke away, turning to open the cupboard and reached in for a pot.
“I’m tired, I’m not going to come. Can you get the pasta out, and that paste we like? I’ll mix up something nice and easy.”
She hadn’t been to ICE for months. The dark bar and drunken conversations shouted above the noisy music seemed light years away from where she was during the day.
In the office she was taking every opportunity she could, volunteering for everything that the bosses threw onto the front desk. She made a point of finding out who was buying what, which investment companies were bulk-buying repossessed properties. Be interested, she kept telling herself. She made notes on index cards which she secretly kept in her purse. At lunchtime she went up to the rooftop terrace and pointed out into the cityscape, locating buildings and matching them up with companies, names, saying the name of the property and who owned it out loud, then checking the cards, reprimanding herself if she got it wrong.
She was getting better and better at it, slowly but surely becoming fluent in this new language. She came home with copies of council planning drafts, road proposals, and reclamation notices. By the time she had eaten and looked through these, she just wanted to sit on the sofa and watch TV, drink wine, and be comfortable. The thought of the bar, the clash of loud music and half heard conversations, bumping people and squeezed dancing was something she wanted to get beyond. And she was working hard to do it.
After dinner Martin turned on his computer. Alison scanned another property magazine.
“I don’t believe it. That was quick.” Martin murmured.
“What’s that?”
“They’ve read ‘The Fly Guy’ story already and it’s going to be in the next edition but …” he trailed off as he read.
“But what? Martin?”
He turned the laptop around and slid it across the table. She put the magazine aside, open on the page with New Acre in bold italics at the top, and pulled it closer. The email read: Hi Martin. ‘The Fly Guy’ is a wonderful piece, really creepy and unsettling. We will definitely feature it in the next issue. You have a great tone and the positive feedback on your stories is pouring in. We were just discussing that you should try a full-length piece. Have you ever tried that? A novel? Both Rich and I have worked in publishing for years and we both know agents and publishing houses that would love your work. We could pass their details to you when you are ready to present something. You should think about it. In the meantime, keep sending us the stories!! Best regards, Bubba and Rich, Noire.
Alison looked up. Martin was beaming.
“So you’re—”
“I’m going to write a book!” Martin said loudly. He drummed his hands on the edge of the table. “I’m going to write a book!”
Alison laughed. “You’re going to write a book!”
“Ozzy is going to get a kick out of this. He thinks the stories are freaky enough, wait till he hears there’ll be a whole book!” Martin jumped out of his seat. “Chapter one. I’m going to get changed for work.” He laughed went into the bedroom.
Alison read the email again. A book.
That night when he climbed into bed next to her, she turned to him.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as she put her leg around his hip, “we should get somewhere together. This place is too small.” She kissed him. “Mmm, you are nice and fresh. I do like it when a freshly showered man climbs into my bed. What do you think?”
“Have you seen somewhere?” He rubbed his hand along her thigh, following the contour of her leg.
“Somewhere you’d like to be?”
“I think so. I’ll show you. Maybe you could stop working at ICE? Concentrate on the book? It takes me forever to get across town to work from here. This place is on the right side of the city. You hardly ever go back to yours anyway.”
“I’d be happy never to back there again,” he said. He reached down. She took his hand and pulled it back up, kissing him lightly.
“Hey, mister, take it easy.”
“Wherever you are, that’s where I want to be,” he said.
“Since we’ve been together,” she said, “everything has gone right. So, let’s just do it.”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
She kissed him again and turned over. Within minutes she was asleep. Martin lay awake and stared into the darkness.
* * *
Alison and Martin drove out from the city, away from the high-rises, the city towers, the endless concrete rows. Out on the motorway the countryside opened out for them. It was summer. The green hills basked in the sunshine, rolling away into the distance like a painting from the brush of a romantic artist. After the roundabout the road rose before them and as they climbed, Martin saw the land undulate below them, the rows of hedges dividing the fields, the freshly dug earth overturned, and the livestock grazing lazily in the lush pasture.
“This is beautiful,” Martin said.
“It’s in there,” Alison replied, gesturing out her window. All along the other side of the road was a grey corrugated fence. Over the top of the fence Martin could see the arms of diggers and the tops of trucks. When they turned into it, they went under a big archway with NEW ACRE across it in embossed metal. Martin pushed himself further back into his seat when he saw what the men and the machines had done. The road turned to a flattened dusty path, and the shells of houses were being constructed. Big lorries with extendable arms trundled past men with fluorescent jackets and helmets.
“They’re nearly all sold,” Alison said excitedly. “Another six weeks and the whole estate will be finished. Can you believe that? It’s so quick.”
Scaffolds stood like brittle iron frames, thick pipes were snug in trenches, piles of earth like sentries guarding the plot. All of the houses looked exactly the same, regimented like a newly constructed army, red brick and narrow, roofs tall and steeply angled, standing to attention side by side with just enough room for a cat to squeeze between them. The thin porches over the front doors were like the visors of blackjack dealers. Next to the driveway was a thin rectangle of grass, a bright green ticket beside the smooth black tarmac.
“It’s so nice out of the city. Wait till you see inside. It’s this one, number eleven.”
Martin and Alison got out of the car and walked to the front door. She took out a set of keys and let herself in. Straightaway they were in the front room, with a staircase right in front of them.
“The front room gets all the light, there’s no entrance hallway to eat up space and light. Isn’t it nice? This staircase gives you a great storage area underneath and on this side, we can have a feature wall. You know? Some really nice textured wallpaper to contrast the walls.”
Martin was uncomfortable, like he had wandered into a shop he didn’t want anything from but couldn’t see an exit. It had the personality of a new cardboard box. They walked through the front room and to the kitchen at the back.
“Oh look, the kitchen is already fitted, and it’s bigger than you’d think, isn’t it? From the front?”
Through the window he could see the back garden; a narrow stretch of grass with a wooden slat fence around it. There were young trees planted at the end, their branches thin and small, trunks as thin as his wrist, except for one in the middle, which was thicker, whose green branches swept down toward the ground, like the skirt of a girl that was being twirled.
“It’s got three rooms upstairs,” Alison said. “You can have a room for your writing.” Martin followed her up the stairs and looked out the window of the back room, down onto the back garden and over the fence into the other gardens with the same young trees growing at the end of the green strip. This was the only one with the thicker, taller tree. Alison was still talking from the other room.
“This one is definitely the master bedroom. The wardrobes are sunk into the walls.”
From here he could see the layout of the estate and the countryside beyond. Martin knew that all of the construction he could see from the window was all based on plans which would result in buildings identical to the one in which he stood, slotted together like the cells in a beehive.
Alison’s voice came to him again. “It’s great, I love the fact that it’s brand new. I will have to show you the contract.”
Martin considered this. This space where he stood now, elevated from the ground, had not been occupied before. The first ghosts to haunt this place would be theirs. Martin began to see the potential of a soulless shell. They could fill it with themselves, grow a new soul within it. There was nothing here to connect him with a past, only a future.
“And the attic, the attic is perfect for converting. It could be another room, or maybe that could be your writing room, and the bathroom has a lot of light, no bath, but we don’t do baths anyway, do we?”
He looked out the window at the other houses, all standing to empty attention around him. They would all be filled, filled with the potential of the lives within them. Each person in each house will leave their own ghost behind. The houses may look identical on the outside but soon their insides would all be different, changed forever.
Alison came in behind him and said, “Did you hear me? About the attic? Have you seen the bathroom?”
Martin didn’t turn around, just replied, “I know how I’m going to start the book.”
***