Wraith, page 13
‘Are you sure we shouldn’t look at him a bit harder?’ I query. ‘I mean, it’s the only recent thing with the name “Cibyyl” in it. You’d hunt someone down too, if you handed them twenty million dollars and they didn’t come through for you. Maybe that’s what @therealKit is referring to.’
‘It could have been any old Cibyyl he was talking about,’ Jamie mutters. ‘And, anyway, Cibyyl never replied. No one did. It was just another 3am ramble in the dark.’
‘How many Cibyyls do you know in real life?’ I insist. ‘I think this is important.’
Jamie pretends she doesn’t hear me as she clicks onto an indie music fan site and starts searching through the Next Big Thing gossip forums for mentions of our elusive blonde.
Hours pass in which Jamie sits hunched over her keyboard, doggedly typing. I’m woken from an uneasy doze in my armchair when Jamie cries out, ‘What kind of indie folk singer doesn’t want to get bloody found these days?’
As the light disappears from the day, I get up to fix us more soup while Jamie continues shooting off queries to everyone she can think of who owes her a favour, real or otherwise. It feels like a breakthrough when we work out that Cibyyl’s bank account is held at a small agricultural bank domiciled in Switzerland, but after a bit more digging, that’s all we’ve got.
The firewalls on the bank’s databases are like nothing you’ve ever seen, someone called $$yber messages Jamie, but I’m working on it for you.
‘$$yber is good,’ Jamie mutters, ‘but it could still take days. And I hate waiting. It’s all I ever bloody do now. Wait.’
She shoots off an email to Bianca with the details of what we’ve managed to glean about Cibyyl’s bank account, but nothing comes back. ‘Probably because she worked it out hours before we did,’ Jamie sniffs.
‘Ryan Daley’s not the only person who’s impossible to find,’ I snarl as I get up to turn on more lights throughout the house. The darkness feels more oppressive than usual today. ‘I can’t stand much more of this, Jamie. My head’s pounding.’
When I shuffle back into the study, I find Jamie staring intently at the video of Cibyyl singing that wistful song by the Beatles again. Of the handful of covers, it’s the one with the most likes, which isn’t saying a lot; Cibyyl might look the goods, but she’s a little bit crap. There’s something about her that’s just the slightest bit off; like her heart isn’t really in it and she’s going through the motions.
Finally, in exasperation and all out of fresh ideas, Jamie creates an account and leaves a comment under the video clip.
Message **Mercy** via Rabbleknowledgenet with whatever it is that you want, is all the comment says.
‘Uh,’ I say uncertainly as Jamie’s comment pops up onscreen, sitting right above a list of crude Hey, baby-style invites to get cosy and naked. ‘Mercy isn’t available right now to take your call. Plus, Cibyyl won’t know who Mercy is, will she? And Mercy’s hopeless with technology. I’ve witnessed her trying to work out what to do with a cell phone, and that was when she had a body. I can’t just “channel” her, Jamie — Mercy does what she wants; she always has. Even if I could, I’m pretty certain Mercy couldn’t find or use Rabbleknowledgenet — excuse me? — even if you set a howling demon in front of it with a sign on its head saying Type message here.’
My heart twists at the sudden memory of the call Ryan made to my phone in Milan when Mercy was still holed up inside Irina’s slinky size zero body. Mercy didn’t even know how to hold or speak into the thing properly, let alone kill the call to Ryan without fumbling and crying. It was pitiful to watch. I almost teared up — and back then, making me cry was a huge deal.
Jamie’s face tightens briefly in a smile. ‘From what I’ve learnt about her, Mercy isn’t averse to a little identity theft to get what she wants. We’re just going to do the same thing and see what happens. If Cibyyl’s looking for a major record deal or a reality TV show of her own, she’ll play. If she doesn’t, no harm done, and we ask Bianca to show us hers. It won’t be a dead end. I’ve got a good feeling, darl. Trust me.’
Then Jamie sets her computers — all eight of them — to hibernate, solicitously puts a scarred claw under my elbow and ushers me out to the kitchen.
***
This time, I’m woken by the sounds of gagging and terrible struggle across the hall. Like the noises a woman would make fighting for her life.
Sitting bolt upright, a cold bright light spills across the carpet outside my door, just for an instant. I leap out of bed, terrified that maybe Jamie’s angel has come for her. From the expression on Jamie’s face while Bianca and I were talking this afternoon, I have a feeling I know who he is.
I fall across the threshold of Jamie’s bedroom only to see her rise slowly out of her own bed with a sightless look in her wide-open eye. There’s no one in the room besides the two of us, but every hair on my body, I swear, is standing up the same way it had around Skorobogatov at the Argo.
Something’s in here, with us.
‘Jamie?’ I say aloud, too scared to reach out and actually touch her. She doesn’t answer. Walking straight past me as if I’m not there — in her knee-length tee-shirt nightgown, head in its usual casing of livid pink pressure bandage — she goes down the staircase in the pitch dark, her movements surefooted and her tread oddly heavy for someone so slight.
‘What are you doing?’ I call after her, turning and grabbing up a pair of thick socks and my phone, plus a cardigan and beanie because the night air is frigid. It’s like breathing in ice.
But Jamie doesn’t turn or stop, and by the time I’m headed downstairs at a run, she’s already reached the lowest tread in the darkness. I watch her walk straight past the umbrella stand full of umbrellas she never uses because she never goes outside anymore.
She opens the battery of locks on her front door with calm deliberation.
Twist lock, deadlock, chain.
Then Jamie steps outside — feet, legs and arms completely bare — shutting the door behind her. Right in my startled face.
In the time it takes me to jam my hunting boots on and get outside, the weight of my phone inside my cardigan pocket banging against the top of my thigh, Jamie’s almost all of the way out of Derbyshire Row. A few turns later and she’s leading me straight through the western edge of Weavers Fields, which are deserted and eerie at this hour. As she makes her way unerringly in the direction of Spitalfields, the few people Jamie passes on the street actually leap aside when they register what she looks like.
She’s striding with purpose through badly lit areas I’ve never been into before — past darkened primary schools and church rectories, cat emporiums and health centres, pubs and tattoo parlours — taking brisk shortcuts with absolute indifference up smelly back lanes and alleys that are pitch dark and could harbour anything. I can’t be sure, because she’s moving so quickly, but the bare skin on the backs of her arms and bare legs appears faintly luminous from a distance. Although I could be imagining things, because I’m seeing phantom smears of light everywhere, as if they’re painted on my retinas.
The air feels like dry ice, like it could freeze your heart inside you. It’s hurting my ears, nose and lungs just breathing in and out as I limp along, struggling to keep Jamie in sight.
When a drunk rears up out of someone’s half-open garage door and tries to put his arms around Jamie in a crushing bear hug, I run forward, hands outstretched, shouting a warning. But Jamie — a woman with the build of a malnourished fourteen-year-old girl — just does something quick with her clenched fists and a twist of her slight hips and the man’s on his back on the slick cobbles, roaring in pain. I’m past him before he can try anything else, only to see Jamie stride without pause into the thin traffic moving along the A10 into Shoreditch.
We pass more fitness clubs and cafés, but now their darkened windows are interspersed with upmarket dance fitness studios, real estate agencies and art galleries. I’m as fit as I’m ever going to be, but Jamie’s just powering ahead, not even looking back to see if I’m following or bothering to stay to the lighted areas. She’s completely indifferent to her surroundings.
Jamie emerges out of a laneway, passing the side wall of a closed Boots chemist into a wide thoroughfare lined with parking garages and billboards, business colleges and finance houses. She suddenly freezes in an attitude of watchfulness in the centre of the footpath, so I freeze too, just inside the mouth of the laneway.
Something about Jamie’s complete stillness, her attitude of single-minded focus on the five-storey, redbrick art deco building across the road reminds me of the giant attack dogs Irina employed the one and only time we returned to Russia to visit her mother. ‘If anyone tries to touch me,’ Irina murmured at the dog handlers as her beast-led entourage stepped out of a series of ostentatious black armoured Mercedes Benzes outside a falling-down housing estate near the Novosibirsk train station, ‘you tell them to rip out the face.’ She made a circle with long splayed fingers around her own ethereal visage — just in case her instructions hadn’t been clear enough — and laughed.
Barely able to breathe around the painful stitch in my side, I watch Jamie stare at the building as if she could set fire to it with her gaze. Coming up tentatively behind her right shoulder, I struggle to make out the name of the building we’re looking at in the gloom. There are a couple of huge potted trees in stainless steel planters on either side of the looming glass double doors that make up the entrance with one stainless steel D facing the right way and another facing the wrong way for handles. The building’s signage is so discreet it’s almost non-existent.
I puzzle out the name, Bar Darlie, in simple letters just above the long steel and wood bar that’s visible through one of the ground-floor windows, figuring the place must be some kind of boutique hotel. Even at this hour, there are seriously built security guards in dark suits and overcoats posted on either side of the potted trees, who wouldn’t be out of place modelling for Ralph Lauren on the side.
Well to the left of the front entrance I make out a cordoned-off area, overseen by a few more well-groomed security boys. It’s packed with pubescent girls and a scattering of mums and young women, all bundled up in heavy coats, down jackets and beanies. They’re all sitting on camp stools or huddled in sleeping bags, makeshift tents and cardboard shelters, alone or in groups, packed in like sardines as if they’re having an outdoor sleepover on one of the coldest nights in winter. It’s almost 4am, but there must be hundreds of them penned in there. Some are holding handmade signs and placards with borders of hearts or flowers or stars drawn on them. They’re waiting for a glimpse of someone famous, I know, because I’ve been on the other side of makeshift holding pens just like that one, dozens of times before.
Someone in the movies or TV? Maybe fashion? Not business or politics, it’s pretty clear from the captive demographic.
A road sign on a nearby building reads Great Eastern Street, and I work out, shocked, that we’ve reached the outskirts of central London. The Barbican’s not far from here. Jamie’s walked almost two icy city miles in bare feet.
Without warning, Jamie suddenly moves away from me towards the kerb, as if she’s about to step off in front of the taxi that’s only inches away. Instinctively, I run forward and grab her by the shoulder to stop her being run over…only to have my right hand catch fire.
I look at it there, burning faintly on Jamie’s shoulder, phantom flames licking hungrily up the back of my hand, a pale, corrosive luminosity moving slowly up past my wrist, past my forearm.
Mercy’s left hand — when she hung in the demon Gudrun’s grasp on the catwalk in Milan — flamed the same way.
I can’t tell if I’m freezing, or burning up.
I am one huge sucked-in breath of anguish, but I can’t rip my hand away. It could be fused to Jamie’s body.
Inside my head I hear a whisper: Look.
There’s so much hatred in that voice, like dark honey. Hate and honey: a startling contradiction.
The thing that’s possessed Jamie is female. And I know I’ve heard that voice before in a different place. A human place. In another life, when I was another person.
I’m in so much pain and terror I can’t think properly. I search my mind for clues, trying to put faces and voices together, but nothing comes to me.
It’s not someone I ever knew well.
And it’s not Mercy, I know that. But it’s someone like her.
Not Mercy, no, the voice drawls inside my skull. But someone who knows her, yes. A friend.
She spits that word friend with so much loathing I know the truth must be the opposite.
Who are you?
I can’t push the words out through my clenched teeth, but inside my head I’m screaming them, and she hears, turning her head to look at me over her shoulder. She stares at me through Jamie’s unblinking hazel eye and I wonder what the creature looks like when she’s not hiding. Beautiful, I’m sure. Not in the way that sells magazines or movies, but elemental, like Mercy is, or that demon inside the Argo was. Strong. Terrifying. Like a myth made real.
Where’s Jamie gone? It’s an effort even to think the words. It feels like I’m blacking out on my feet.
There’s a burst of harsh laughter. The same place you do when Mercy has need of your body, she replies. Submerged, like the drowned; held under by a power that will always be greater — because we were created to rule over you. Look around you, Gia Basso. I’m giving you both what you want. The answers are here. In the flesh.
It’s almost impossible to rip my eyes away from my burning hand or move my head, but I roll my eyes left and right, up and down the wide boulevard running between us and the hotel across the way. I gasp at what I see. It’s the only sound I can force out of my throat, which is arched and taut as if I am screaming.
Everything looks different now.
I know it’s because I’m touching her — the monstrous thing hooked tight inside Jamie’s living, breathing body. The demon inside Jamie is letting me see the world through demonic eyes.It’s as stunning as the scene I witnessed on the isolated bluff outside Craster: worlds within worlds.
What was there before, on Great Eastern Street, is still there. But there’s so much…more. There are things here now, impossible things, all superimposed upon the physical world. Buildings built upon and through other buildings, people moving through other people, wandering animals, drays pulled by draughthorses clattering straight through approaching cars and minivans, women in headscarves and long overcoats pushing wooden handcarts filled with salvage along phantom stretches of cobblestone marked by gaslight, spruikers in bowler hats and ragged three-piece suits, screeching gangs of little boys in waistcoats and short pants, in shirt sleeves and breeches, fighting over a scrappy leather ball in the street. Life upon life upon life, time upon time upon time, all jumbled together.
The noise. The stench.
I cower from the sheer overload of sounds — mechanical and human — and the odour of packed-in, desperate lives spent in unsewered streets. Years of jumbled sounds, voices, smells; it’s overpowering. All the more so because I know that most of it is…phantom.
This is what life is like for us, she hisses, the Exiled. This is the dominion and the power that was promised to us by our rebel King. This boundless...munificence.
Jamie throws a clawed hand out at the streetscape seething with wraithlike things and, distracted, I don’t see her until the moment a slack-faced, bowed-over old woman with a sack of something lumpen slung across her shoulders suddenly approaches me from the right … and passes straight through me.
I throw my free hand up protectively at the moment of contact, feeling a sensation like thousands of icy, piercing needles bursting upon my skin, unable to shield myself from the awful sensation of being run through.
The woman doesn’t reappear. It’s like she’s been atomised.
Just because she touched me, I destroyed her.
The thing inside Jamie laughs again.
Every street, every place, in this barren, benighted, sucked-dry world of yours is more than what it appears — didn’t the great Gabriel teach you that? You’re in the landscape of nightmare now, my dear, the voice like dark honey says into the space behind my eyes. The landscape which was Lucifer’s inheritance and his ‘gift’ to those who loved and served him, from which nothing is ever lost: energy returning to energy, a closed loop that only seems to grow more imperfect, more chaotic, as time passes.
And in the landscape of nightmare, human — demons and angels are not the only ones to wield power. Tell the one who is twice-dead that, this time, I am owed. And I never forgive a debt — great or small.
I never forgive.
There’s a sensation, an instance of parting, and I stumble backwards, released from the demon’s burning, magnetic hold.
Then Jamie turns her face away from me and raises her right hand to shoulder height, fingers spread outward, palm downward, and the ground begins to ripple like water.
16
Small waves at first.
Then the ripples build outward from Jamie’s outstretched fingers, shivering in larger and larger swells, wave after wave rising higher, as if reality is elastic.
All the streetlights for blocks around flicker before extinguishing. But I can see, because Jamie seems to light up from the inside, casting a grey-silver glow like a corona around her small body.
Then the shaking begins, and the terrified screams of ‘What’s happening?’ are soon swallowed by the intense roar of falling masonry, of asphalt, steel and mortar tearing apart.
