The Messengers (12 page)

And I told him the story of how I’d saved Kelly the Hen.

“You did
what
?” he said.

“I stopped it from happening. Well, Max stopped it, really, but —”

Peter smashed his fist into the desk, and I jumped.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

“Don’t you see what you’ve done? This could be a disaster. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. This is unknown territory! Every piece of knowledge that has been passed down points to the fact that death has an order.”

“Oh, garbage,” I said.

“It’s a stupid risk. We have to stick to what little we know. We have to play it safe. If Tabby taught me one thing, it’s that you can mess with life all you want, but you
cannot
mess with death.”

“Doctors do it all the time,” I said.

“No! You don’t know that.” He was on his feet now. “What if, when a doctor
supposedly
saves someone, it’s because that person wasn’t ready to die? That’s what
I
believe. That’s what I’ve learned from being a messenger: death is mapped out. You can’t reason with it, and you can’t stop it. It’s a force of nature, and it takes whatever is in its way.”

“That’s a cop-out, Peter. That’s just an excuse to sit back and do nothing. People can make a difference in the world. People can change things. We have a choice.”

“Who the hell are you to imagine that you have any control over life and death?” Peter said.

“Well, I obviously do, because I saved Kelly.”

“And at what price? At what price? Eh?” He crouched down to me, shouting in my face, and I wondered if he was losing it. After all, he just told me he’d spent time in an institution. “Do you have any idea about the consequences of what you’ve done?” he said.

“No. Do you?” I said.

“That’s . . . I . . .”

“You don’t, do you?”

“I . . . Tabby warned me about this. She said it was the unbreakable rule.”

“And you’re saying you never tried it? Not once?”

“Of course I didn’t! Tabby made it perfectly clear that —”

“Who was Tabby, anyway? What made her such an authority on everything?”

“Don’t you dare doubt her! Besides, the stakes are too high to mess about. You can’t just
try things
. My family —”

“But
you
showed Kelly the postcard,” I said. “
You
delivered the message. By your logic, nothing will happen to your family.”

“What about
yours
?” he said. “You have put the people you love in terrible jeopardy.”

For some reason, that made me snap. “The people I love are already in jeopardy! I’ve got a nervous wreck of a mum who won’t even talk to me. The bloody police are hunting down my brother like an animal. And God only knows where my dad is. As for me, if I have to spend the rest of my life as a murderer, then I’d rather be dead.”

Peter looked shocked.
Good
, I thought. I marched out of his hut and slammed the door.

That night, I sat with Auntie Lizzie in the living room. On the TV, detectives were gathered at crime scenes where the murders had already happened. Maybe, I thought, I didn’t need Peter. What good had he done me so far? I tried to convince myself I could get through it all on my own.

At about nine p.m., I started to feel tired. It seemed like the furniture was suddenly too big, as if the sofa might swallow me up. So I said good night to Auntie Lizzie and went upstairs. I began to feel woozy before I got to the top, and I blacked out on the landing. The next few minutes were oblivion, and when I woke up in the trancelike state, I pulled a postcard and a pencil from my rucksack, and I drew the message there and then.

I must have fallen asleep on the landing, because Uncle Robert found me at around eleven p.m., huddled over the postcard.

“Frances?” he whispered. “Are you OK?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I covered the postcard, although he’d only have seen a jumble of shapes anyway. Still, he looked at me suspiciously. In fact, he almost looked afraid. I wondered about what I was becoming.

“Right. OK, then,” he said, walking off to the bathroom.

In my bedroom, I looked at what I’d drawn.

A streetlight in an alleyway.

A woman lying on the ground, blood across her face.

There was a rolled-up bundle by her legs and the contents of a Sainsbury’s shopping bag scattered around her body.

Four youths were leaving the scene.

I needed Peter. I had no idea how to read the message, no idea where the death would take place, and no idea how to stop it from happening. I needed him because — although I never would have admitted it — I was frightened. And I needed him because he quickened my pulse and made me feel alive.

Then I looked closer at the woman in the picture. Beneath the wounds, I recognized her and my heart jumped.

It was Helen from the Coffee Shack.

I had my pride. So it wasn’t like I went banging on his door.

But I spent most of the next morning sitting on one of the metal chairs outside the Coffee Shack, watching Helen serve the customers, and storm clouds rolling in over the sea.

Peter came and found me. He stood at my table. “Can I sit down?”

“Not if you’re going to bang on about how irresponsible I am.”

“I won’t. But I do need to say something. You shouldn’t have said you’d rather be dead. You’re a good person, and you’ve got a lot to live for.”

“Well,” I said. “I suppose you can sit down, then.”

He did. “I’m sorry about how I reacted,” he said.

“It’s OK. But don’t you see what it could mean, if we can save people? For you? For both of us?”

I knew he was thinking of his son. I could see that it caused him pain. He shook his head and lit a cigarette. “I suppose I’ve accepted the situation for so long that it seemed easier to go on accepting it. There’s nothing more painful than . . .”

“Hope?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I put my hand on his arm.

“How did you find the clues, again?” he said.

“I scanned the painting onto a computer and enlarged it. The image is so small, but I could zoom in and move around, looking for what might have happened. Your paintings have such detail, so that helped.”

“I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

“Pete, this could set you free from all the pain you have to witness. And it could mean you’re able to see your family again. You could meet your boy. Even if you paint him, God forbid, you’ll be able to work out how to stop it from happening.”

“That’s a huge risk,” he said.

He was imagining it — imagining himself painting the death of his son, the horror of waking up to it. He was imagining himself showing the painting to the boy, and the panic of trying to work out what was going to happen.

“It would be worth it though, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“For me perhaps.”

“For the bloody recipients!” I said.

“Well, yes,” he said. “They obviously stand to benefit.”

“And for your boy, too. He’d have a dad. Better than that,” I said. “He’d have you.”

“Maybe I could just see him a couple of times,” Peter said. “Just to meet him.”

“Yes! See how it goes.”

He took a deep breath. “I think the computer zoom might be better than my loupe,” he said. “Will you show me how to scan the pictures and search them?”

“Of course. Don’t you have a scanner?” I said.

“No.”

“We can go to the library.”

He stood up.

“Peter,” I said, taking the postcard of Helen from my rucksack. “We can start with this.”

He turned his head and squinted at the pencil sketch. “Hey, isn’t that . . . ?” He turned to look at the serving counter of the Coffee Shack.

“Yes,” I said.

“When did you draw it?”

“Last night.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

We rushed off to the library. A car slowed down on the main road, and I immediately winced, as if an accident would follow. The messenger instinct. But nobody died this time, and the man in the car was Uncle Robert. I made eye contact briefly, but Robert was more concerned with the tall man at my side.

“We’ll have to get one of those computers in the corner of the room,” I said. Of course, being the area of a public library used mainly by people who didn’t have home Internet access, it was full of folk who looked weirder than us, doing things that were only slightly less dodgy.

We waited for a bloke with half a skinhead to stop scanning the palms of his hands, and then we moved in and got to work. I showed Peter how to upload the image of the postcard, and we waited some more. I flinched when it opened. I didn’t know Helen beyond buying a cup of tea from her, but it was still hard to see her like that, her face bloodied.

Peter was calm. He’d seen this sort of thing so many times before. “Our job is to work out her final movements,” he said. “How do I zoom in?”

I showed him.

He swept across the picture, zeroing in on certain details: the streetlight, the trainers of one of the youths leaving the scene, Helen’s face, the Sainsbury’s carrier bags. He muttered to himself. Eventually, he focused on the rolled-up bundle by her knee.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Looks like a yoga mat,” said Peter.

“So, that’s a clue! She goes to yoga.”

“This is Helmstown,” Peter said. “There are approximately ten million yoga classes.”

“So how do we find out which one she goes to?” I said.

“We use an old-fashioned research method,” Peter said.

“What’s that?”

“We talk to her. You’re going to ask her where she does her class.”

“Why me?”

“You have a rapport with her,” Peter said. It was true. And it was what made this message so scary.

We stared at the screen a little longer. “You need to speak to her as soon as possible and get as much information as you can. A street name at least,” he said.

I felt suddenly nervous about the prospect of speaking to Helen.

“Could we not just tell her what’s going to happen?” I said.

“What, you mean go up to her and say, ‘Excuse me, I wouldn’t go to yoga tomorrow night, because you’re going to die on the way back’?”

“She wouldn’t believe us,” I said.

“She’d have us locked up,” Peter said. “I should know. If we’re going to do this sort of thing, we need to stay under the radar.”

I nodded. “OK. I’ll speak to her. I’ll do it when I deliver the message.”

“Today,” he said.

“She’ll have finished her shift. I’ll do it tomorrow.” I paused. “Peter.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t look at this anymore. I feel sick,” I said.

“OK,” he said, taking the postcard out of the scanner and clicking the
X
to close the window. “Let’s call it a day. I’ll go back to the Coffee Shack and see what I can find out about her from the other staff. You need some rest.”

We left the library and emerged into a gray, humid headache of an afternoon. “I have to go back to my auntie’s,” I said.

“Yes,” Peter said. He looked at me.

“Y’all right, mate?” I said.

He put his arms around me, and I let myself enjoy the nearness of him. I put my hand on his chest, and he didn’t move it away. I felt this weight, this urge, pulling me toward him. I couldn’t get near enough. “Thank you, Frances,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable about messing with fate yet. We’ll have to keep an eye on the consequences. . . .”

I sighed.

“But thank you for trying,” Peter said.

“That’s OK,” I said. “You owe me, though.”

He said something else as he turned to go. It sounded like “You’re amazing,” but I couldn’t be sure. Since Johnny had gone, I hadn’t heard those sort of words much.

I walked around the block a couple of times. I called Mum, I called Johnny, but I couldn’t get an answer. I felt like I had a lot of energy, a lot of power, and it had to go somewhere. So I made sure Peter had left the area, and then I went back into the library, to the local studies section. I took a piece of scrap paper, sat down at a computer with a couple of telephone directories, and began to search for Peter’s son.

The next day, I went to the beach as early as I could. The life of Helen, a coffee waitress in her twenties, was in our hands. We had until about 9:15 p.m. that night to save her. I walked toward the Coffee Shack and stood back for a moment. They had a Saint George flag on the shack, because of the football tournament, but without much wind, the cross on the flag had drooped and looked more like an
X
. Helen’s red hair was tied back, and steam from the kettle rose around her face. I got in line. Greg, the man with the whippet, was there again. The guy drank so much coffee, it was a wonder his brain didn’t explode.