The Neon Court (9 page)

Something wrong.

I headed for the bus shelter. A night bus pulled away as I approached. On the back window, in tiny letters, someone had scratched with diligence and a sharp object,

help me

I could smell the river, catch a corner of its magic in the palm of my hand with the cool breeze that came off the waters. I caught the first
bus headed for Greenwich, sat at the very back, above the hot buzz of the engine, feet stuck up on the lip of the window by the emergency exit, arms wrapped round my chest, right hand aching, eyes tired. Back east again, down the Jamaica Road, Canada Water and its dull yellow shopping mausoleums, sprawling grey car parks, gleaming glass stations, smart, soulless apartment blocks overlooking the water. Greenwich again: I caught a glimpse of the drawings of the Whites on the walls, of

half cat, half squirrel, blue eyes raised towards the sky, ice cream cone in one hand, finger pointing east

and of

child holding a wilting flower, face sad

or of

copper in a copper’s hat, face smeared out, fingers twisted into broken twigs

I got out a few streets away from the hotel, half ran the short distance to it, didn’t know why, had to resist the urge to drag flame to our fingertips.

The front door was locked.

The sign in the window said

HOTEL VACANCIES

I hammered on the door, buzzed the buzzer, tapped on the windows.

Dark inside. Not a light burning, not even in the hall.

I rummaged in my satchel until I found my set of blank keys, dozens of them, every kind of make, and picking the nearest make that matched, coaxed it into the lock and then into the right shape, soothing the lock to obey my commands until, with a reluctant snap, it came undone.

The door swung open.

Darkness inside.

Not a telly hummed, not a radio blared, not a bulb hissed, not a footstep was trod.

I closed the door behind me and fumbled in the dark for a light switch. My foot bumped against something on the floor. A guest book, fallen from its little table by the door and left there. My fingers found the switch. I turned it on. Nothing. Darkness.

I stumbled a few paces further, found the reception desk, considered ringing the bell, thought better of it. I thought I heard the sound of footsteps behind me and turned, electricity snapping to my fingertips, filling the hall with white-blueness around me. Nothing there. My back felt exposed, I thought of knives and things moving in the dark. I spun the electricity around me, made a mesh of it across my shoulders and down my arms, felt my hair stand on end, saw the little yellow sparks build in the open mains sockets by my right foot as I drew power from the things around me. By my blue electric glow, I found another light switch, flicked it on. Nothing. I stood on the chair behind the reception desk and examined the bulb in the ceiling. It was scarred black on the inside, and the hair of the tungsten filament hung limp and dead inside its glass coffin. I headed into the breakfast room. There were plates on tables, toast half eaten on the plates, baked beans, stone cold, congealed scrambled egg, bacon curled up in its own solidified fats. I found a door marked private, standing half ajar. I pushed it back. A man sat, his back to me, hands on a desk piled with books and ledgers, head bowed. I said, “Sir?”

No answer.

“You OK?”

Nothing.

I pushed the electricity away a little from my fingertips, reached out and touched his shoulder. Cold, dead meat in human form. I turned the chair he sat in. He had no eyes. He had two broken red spheres, whites full of blood, irises cracked and full of blood, face streaked with blood that had flowed from the tear ducts – not eyes. Two boiled cherry tomatoes where eyes should have been. The blood had run down his face, dribbled across his mouth, stained his shirt crimson. There was blood in the hollows of his ears, blood in his nose, blood under his nails. Blood in the scratches around the hollows of his eyes where he’d tried to claw them out.

We turned away, stomach clenching, and made it all the way to the door before the urge to puke, without the blissful release of puking itself, caught our stomach in its dusty hot fist and held us. I pushed us into the hall, leant against the wall, breathed deep of the warm musty air, tried to half close my eyes and found I didn’t dare. The stairs to the attic where I’d left Oda had been barely a few dozen when I’d climbed
them the first time; now, there were hundreds of them, and each step took a lifetime. I passed a door half open on the first floor, and glancing inside, saw the body of a man, half naked, his head turned towards me, his hands clasping the sheets of the bed like rope from a ship in a storm, blood across his face and on the carpet, turning it black, eyes broken. On the floor above, my fingers brushed something sticky on the banister, and we didn’t stop to look at what it might be.

No lights on the top floor either.

No smell of death.

The door to Oda’s room was unlocked. I eased it open with my toe, looked down at the bed where I’d left her and saw ruffled sheets, disturbed blanket, pillow curved to the impression of a head and no Oda. I eased it back further, drew a little heat from my fingers and cast it upwards in the shape of a sodium-coloured ball of light to cast illumination over the room. The bulb in the ceiling was burnt black, like all the rest; the light switch didn’t work. There was no sign of blood on the floor, and only the faintest tracery of blood on the sheets, but that was as like as not from the mess on Oda’s clothes as much as anything: old and copper-coloured. I pushed back the door to the bathroom. The mirror was smashed, but there was again no sign of bleeding. My coat lay, damp but drying, where I’d left it in the shower the night before. I picked it up, slung it over the top of my bag, turned back into the bedroom. I sat down on the edge of the bed, sniffed the pillow, smelt nothing particularly untoward, checked the drawers, and saw on the top of the side table a piece of white paper. There were words written in biro on top of it.

They said:

WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU.

And for all we are gods, we wear mortal flesh.

We ran.

I wanted bright lights, clean air and something solid against my back.

Every place I passed, I could think of reasons why it fulfilled none of these desires.

I walked until I didn’t know where I was, and stopped, and stood still, and forced myself to breathe. I was in the middle of a small square, cars ringing its edge, bins overflowing between the pigeon-spattered
benches. A fox blinked at me from behind the back of a padlocked-up, plywood-boarded public toilet. I turned until I could see the lights of Canary Wharf glimmering over the rooftops, named that direction north, found my way to the nearest bench and sat. My head found its way to my hands. In the distance I heard a window slide open, the sound of a polite BBC radio voice declaiming on the social decline of our times. The phone rang in my pocket. I answered.

“Hi Penny.”

“Not too late for you, then?”

I looked up at the dark sky overhead, stained with sodium and scudding clouds. “Dunno. What time is it?”

“Two in the bloody morning.”

“Already?”

Wrong.

Something wrong.

I looked at my watch. The hands were on ten past two.

“Hey, don’t think like I care or anything, but you OK?” asked Penny. “You seem kinda … you know … fucked or something.”

“What gave you that impression?” I asked, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“Dunno. Just usually when I talk to you on the phone, I hear … stuff.”

“Stuff? What kind of stuff?”

“Just … on the edge, you know?”

“What?”

“Look, can we talk about how fucked you are or what?”

“Penny,” I groaned, “come on, cut a guy having a bad … night … a break. What do you hear on the telephone?”

A sigh, a huff of breath. Then, “I hear … and if you call me a prat I’ll do you … I hear … like … singing. Just on the edge. Just right below everything else. When I talk to you on the telephone. Like … a humming … in the wire.” We were silent, too surprised to speak. We must have been silent a while, because she suddenly burst out, “Are you laughing at me?”

“What? No. No, honest, no. Sorry. We are … we weren’t laughing. Nothing like. Hey – by the by – thank you.”

“For what?”

“Keeping an eye on me.”

“Hell …”

“Seriously.”

“Matthew,” she chided, “you’re talking like a total freaked-out pale freak now, and that freaks me out, so just shove it, OK?” Then, “Things that bad?”

“Oh, yeah,” I chuckled with raven humour. “They’re really that bad.”

“You need help?”

“Put it like this – don’t turn your mobile off.”

“OK.”

“And Penny?”

“Yeah?”

“You see or hear or feel anything that freaks the crap out of you – don’t be an arse. Just run. Promise?”

“‘Cause you ask so nice.”

“Cheers. Speak soon, OK?”

I put the phone back in my pocket.

I needed a plan.

What I had was my damp coat. I unfolded it from across my bag, and held it up. There were still suspicious patches on it where the blood hadn’t washed out. I wondered how much of the blood was Oda’s. I decided to go and find out.

It is surprisingly hard to find a church in east Greenwich. It wasn’t that the area lacked for religious houses, but merely that they had been built when the fashion was for short spires if any spire at all, and adaptable spaces and community halls that could cater to sports events and children’s clubs when God wasn’t in residence. I stumbled on one, a Baptist hall made of dark red brick, with wire mesh over the three low stained-glass windows in its front, hopped over the locked gate and hammered on the heavy blue door.

No answer.

No lights on inside.

I wandered round the back and found, by a small annexe of fresher red brick, a small concrete car park with a large sign saying “DISABLED ONLY, NO BALL GAMES” above the two parking spaces, a recycling bin, the shattered remnants of a broken drum kit, and a fire escape,
built by a local council that didn’t trust even in God not to start a fire in his own house. It didn’t take much to convince the lock on the inside of the back door to snap apart at my command, and the local priest, for all he had felt the need to protect his windows with wire mesh, hadn’t bothered with a burglar alarm. I fumbled through the dark until I found a light switch, and turned it on.

I was in a tiny kitchen, containing a pair of tatty stuffed armchairs, a microwave, a sink, a couple of shelves and a small rack of dubiously stained biohazard coffee mugs. On the wall was pinned up a schedule of events, which ranged from local gospel singing lessons through to Italian classes for the over-sixties. A small glass door opened into the main hall, and a switch nearby turned on long rows of white fluorescent tubing in the ceiling. I looked up at a roof of low black criss-crossed wooden beams, along to stained-glass windows depicting, variously, Jesus playing an acoustic guitar, Mary holding a baby and John the Baptist on a drum kit. On one wall were green noticeboards, onto which the local kids had pinned their various understandings of the story of Jesus in A3 crayon form. A box by the main door said, “Please give generously” and a poster above it told the story of Maureen, seventy-eight, and her continued battle to support the lonely, the aged and the lost in the community where she’d lived for forty-five years. The picture of Maureen showed a woman with long drooping cheeks hanging down below the line of her jaw, curly white hair, owl glasses, and a smile that spoke of patient listening that heard all and judged none. I put 50p in the box, and heard it clatter against bare wood inside.

The aisles of the chapel ran between chairs from a stack. At the end was a low trestle table whose purple covering and silver-plated candle-sticks proclaimed it to be an altar. Two loudspeakers were plugged in on either side of it, and in pride of place on its own plinth was a much loved copy of the Holy Bible, heavy enough to stun a shark.

I took my satchel off and sat down in the front row before the altar. Jesus looked down at me with sad understanding from above his guitar. He didn’t have the face of a guy who held a grudge, so I pulled off my jumper, picked up my coat and wrapped it carefully round my shoulders, just as it had been wrapped round Oda’s. I pulled it until the bloodstain that had seeped from Oda’s chest was directly above my heart, and held it tightly around myself, eyes half shut.

I thought of psycho-bitch Oda.

I thought of the sound of her voice, low and cold and usually threatening me with death.

Of the touch of her fingers when she’d taken my hand.

Of her weight across my back as I’d helped her from the fire.

The smell of her blood.

The way she ran, when we’d run together from monsters and demons.

The sound of …

… water …

And the smell of …

… oil …

I could taste metal on my tongue.

I pulled the coat tighter, pressed my fingers into the bloody stain over my chest. Close; the thought of her, the sense of her, still close.

I stood up, and was briefly surprised to find that I was doing this thing, but let it happen, moved with it. My feet carried me to the altar. My knees bent. I knelt. My head hung. I felt …

… shame …

And could hear …

… still water disturbed …

And could taste
…

… metal and salt …

And could feel
…

… pain here pain pain tear it out …

My fingers tightened against my chest, over my heart, and the ache beneath them suddenly rose to heartburn, and then the heartburn became a lance that ran straight through my chest and out the other side, impaling me through the middle. We gasped and rocked back on our heels as the pain hit, felt it pound in our skull, saw it pulse on the back of our eyelids, tried to pull free of the spell and saw

bleeding eyes

and felt

popping ears

and smelt

salt and heat in the nose