Mercy Read online

  Not to me, I think. There’s something about you so familiar I feel the pull of it in my soul.

  ‘She was a soprano like I am,’ I say. ‘She was a singer.

  She should be with us …’

  There’s no need to say any more, for Ryan’s face is bleak and he closes his eyes, swallows convulsively.

  Maybe he understands more, remembers more, of his night terrors than I give him credit for.

  We promise to meet downstairs by the front door after his parents have gone to sleep.

  I head back down the hallway to Lauren’s room, slough off Carmen’s clothing like dead skin and stand under the jets of the shower, head bowed. No thought, no action for a while, just sensation.

  When I get out, there’s one thing I have to do for Carmen. This is her gig, after all. And I’m trashing it.

  I need her to know that I’m looking out for her. I also need to know what my limits are, whether I have any 64

  limits.

  Wrapped once again in a pristine white towel, I take a cracked CD case off the top of a pile of Carmen’s things and slip it into Lauren’s sound system.

  When the music starts up, though I never feel sick and I never feel cold, I cannot stop shivering.

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  Chapter 8

  It is past midnight and I thought the Daleys would never go to bed. Finally, I hear them tossing and turning in their private hells, which is what sleep has become for them, I suppose.

  On the stairs, I freeze momentarily when Mrs Daley cries out, ‘Give her to me!’ in a voice unlike her own. As if she is locked in a contest of wills with the Devil and the Devil is winning.

  Ryan is already waiting near the front door, the loaded rucksack at his feet, lumpy and misshapen.

  ‘Thought you weren’t coming,’ he growls, hand on the latch.

  ‘Wait!’ I whisper. ‘The dogs.’

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  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, frowning. ‘It’ll wake them for sure. We’ll have to go through the Charltons’ place.’

  We head down the hallway back towards the kitchen and Ryan stares hard at me for a moment as I cross into a patch of moonlight.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Nothing.’ He shakes his head and opens the back door quietly. ‘Up and over. Quickly.’

  Ryan vaults the paling fence between the Daleys and the Charltons, who keep no dogs, catching me easily on the way down. Before anyone can see us go, we are already out onto the street and heading north.

  ‘Church is this way,’ says Ryan curtly. I can see he’s already regretting this. ‘Try and keep up.’

  He doesn’t look back again as we cross block after block. Though the streetlights are dim, it’s not hard for me to keep him in sight. The streets are deserted, the night chilly enough to keep even the most hardy, indoors.

  There’s nothing and no one to check our progress and suddenly we’re standing in front of a waist-high wire fence that separates the First Presbyterian Church of Paradise from the street.

  In the dark, the church and its outbuildings look small and uninviting. We stand within the shadow of a 67

  huge spreading pine on the footpath outside the car park entrance and listen for a moment. Like if we concentrate hard enough, we’ll be able to hear Lauren just breathing, just holding on.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say finally, giving Ryan a small shove in the kidneys. ‘Manse is that way.’

  I point him towards a small, clinker-brick, one-storey house on the property next door to the car park with a Pastoral Care Available sign stuck neatly into a garden bed in the front yard. There are no lights on. It’s time to dig.

  I walk forward stealthily in the absolute shadow of the tree, but Ryan doesn’t move.

  ‘Come on!’ I hiss. ‘We don’t have much time. Let’s do this.’

  I don’t fancy Carmen getting caught out here, in Ryan Daley’s company, with no good explanation. I’ve got her into enough trouble already. Everything has to look like it’s by the book from now on. I’ve made that promise to myself, and to her.

  Ryan is still frozen in place, staring at me strangely.

  His eyes are huge in his face.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘You’re, uh …’ he says shakily.

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  ‘Spit it out,’ I snap. ‘Being a choirgirl, I have a rehearsal to get to in the morning and the night isn’t getting any younger, buddy.’

  His hands sketch the air unsteadily. ‘You’re, you’re, uh … glowing.’

  I look down at my hand, hold it up to my face. He’s right. In the absence of light, a faint sheen of illumination seems to seep up out of my skin, the lightest mother-of-pearl glow. It lights up the immediate area around me.

  I frown, and then a hazy memory of the bookshop girl, the girl whose name I can no longer remember, breaks the surface of my mind. Her new boyfriend had said something similar once, on a walk home. It had been a moonless night. We’d been drinking and giggling all night long like thieves, though it had been more of an act on my part. I don’t even like the taste of beer, but I’d downed a truckload of the stuff and it had still done nothing for me. ‘It must be love,’ I’d replied at the time, puzzled. ‘Or beer goggles, Bernie.’

  He’d laughed and forgotten all about it in the harsh light of morning; and I’d left soon afterwards, left the tentative courtship, the rest of her life, to her. The strange comment had completely slipped my mind. But now I saw it for myself.

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  For a moment, I’m grateful for the memory, it’s a beautiful memory and I’ll hold onto it for as long as I can.

  But I’m also angry. It’s just another stupid complication for me to deal with. Right now, it’s not supposed to be about me, although some day soon I hope it will be.

  I let my glowing hand fall gently to my side.

  ‘Oh, that,’ I say casually. ‘Well, I guess I won’t be needing to borrow a torch from you, after all.’

  Perversely, as we approach the back door of the manse and absolute silence is what the situation calls for, all Ryan wants to do is talk.

  ‘How do you do that?’ he hisses. ‘It wasn’t my eyes playing tricks then, back at home. It’s really faint, but noticeable. Like you’re made of it.’

  He runs a finger quickly down one of my arms and it’s electric, his touch. I shake him off quickly, though a big part of me doesn’t want to.

  ‘Shut up and focus,’ I snap.

  I scout the barren backyard for any signs of a trapdoor, a basement; see nothing but withering lawn and concrete. These are not green-fingered people. Their concerns are clearly not of this earth. The house is low to the ground, ugly and functional. There are no suspicious 70

  outbuildings, no other structures at all. If there is any kind of hidden cavity or chamber to this place, it will have to be hewn into the ground itself and accessed from somewhere inside that house.

  Ryan won’t leave it alone. ‘Are you a ghost?’ he demands. ‘You feel pretty real. Has Lauren “crossed over”, is that it? Is she trying to tell me something? Is that why you’re here?’

  I put my hand on the unlatched screen door and say icily, ‘ No, no, no and no as far as I’m aware. If I was a ghost with omniscient powers, you think I’d need to be breaking into some stranger’s house with you? You think I’d even be here? I’d just walk through the walls, wouldn’t I? I’m just a freak with freaky skin, okay?’

  Out of ideas, I show him the unhealed eczema scars on both wrists and he frowns rebelliously.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he growls after a moment.

  ‘And I’m not saying you are,’ I reply fiercely under my breath. ‘But I don’t have all the answers, and that’s the truth. Now either you start digging up the whole backyard like you tried to do around the church today, or we figure out whether this place has a basement from the inside. And I know which option I’m liking better, so get in there, hero boy. We don’t have much time.’

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  Ryan’s mouth compr
esses into a straight line. I know we will be having this talk later. He pulls a pair of gloves from a side pocket of his pack, takes the screen-door latch out of my hand, and pushes me out of the way.

  Of course, being Paradise, the back door is unlocked.

  Shooting me a hard look, Ryan removes a torch from his pack and opens the door silently.

  We comb the house on sneakered feet, from room to room. Study the joints in the floorboards, lift up the rugs and bath mats, play the beam of the torch along the skirting that hugs the intersection between walls and floor, the single manhole cover in the bathroom ceiling, doing everything together, me watching his back, him watching mine.

  The wind begins to build outside, rattling the windows of the little house, masking Ryan’s careless stumble against the television in the front room, the squeak of the pantry door being opened, the sound the cabinet door under the sink makes when it’s pushed shut, of Ryan forcing aside the manhole cover above the toilet and playing his torch around the empty space above our heads. Nothing but dead air and insulation, his eyes tell me, disappointed, as he climbs back down.

  The house gives away nothing more deadly than 72

  religious bric-a-brac and framed photos of the Reverend and his good wife on holiday in the Sinai, the dust-gathering knick-knackery of a God-fearing couple that is childless by His will. They sleep heavily, the sleep of the untroubled, and I am momentarily envious.

  The only room we have not searched is the couple’s own bedroom and we stand outside the closed door now, debating with our eyes what to do.

  What are the chances? I gesture. She can’t possibly be in there.

  I suddenly have a bad feeling about all of this.

  Something doesn’t feel right, and I can’t shake off the idea that Lauren’s singing is somehow at the heart of everything and has to be looked at more closely. What we’re doing here has dead end written all over it.

  We have to know for sure, he signals back urgently.

  You distract them, I’ll search the room.

  I shake my head angrily, slice the air in front of me with one faintly glowing hand. YOU distract them, I’LL

  search the room.

  He doesn’t have my child’s build, my quicksilver sight. It will be faster this way. In and out.

  We stare each other down until he finally pads reluctantly along the hall and kneels in the broken 73

  moonlight streaming in from the long panel of glass beside the front door. I see him take a black ski mask from his rucksack, then put it on. Slide something else out of his pack and slip it into his back pocket. Then he is outside with the pack on, closing the door softly behind him.

  For want of a better plan, I duck behind the bathroom door across the hall from the sleeping couple and wait for Ryan to work his magic.

  I hear the explosion before I see it.

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  Chapter 9

  Through the gap, I see the bedroom door across the hallway fly open.

  A gaping man is silhouetted there, the man from the photos. He is middle-aged, apple-shaped, balding, dark, coarse hair on his legs, the backs of his arms, unremarkable. But then they say psychopaths usually just look like your neighbour anyway, so his features tell me exactly nothing.

  He hastily belts on a bathrobe over his singlet and shorts while his wife lingers in the doorway, the whites of her eyes showing.

  ‘What is it?’ she says fearfully, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as they both stare towards the front of the house.

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  Angling my eye around the gap, I see a weird, red glow reflected through the front windows. Fire. The night is lit by fire. What has he done?

  ‘If I don’t come back in fifteen minutes, Esther,’

  the man says, ‘call the police, the fire brigade. Just stay indoors, whatever you do. I’ll come back for you.’

  He picks up something smooth and heavy that is resting just inside the doorframe of their bedroom and is out the front door, weapon in hand. From the way the woman runs immediately for the telephone in the front room, wringing her hands, I’d say Ryan has ten minutes, tops. I hope he can take care of himself. It’s time for me to move.

  I open the bathroom door wider. When the woman’s back is to me, I dart across the hallway to their bedroom, leaving the door slightly ajar to give me more room to work without being seen. A quick scan reveals nothing out of the ordinary, just rumpled bedding hastily discarded. Taking a deep breath, I crawl around the margins of the room on hands and knees, then beneath the bed, searching for a hidden trapdoor, a loose floorboard, anything to indicate there’s a secret world beyond this chamber. But my search yields nothing. Just four walls, four cross-stitched pillows, a vanity unit and 76

  the bed. I look up. The ceiling is white on white from end to end. Seamless.

  I need to get out of here. We were wrong. This is wrong. It has something to do with the fact she can sing.

  Again, I feel a twinge of discomfort. Carmen, trying to tell me something?

  I am back at the door, my eye to the gap, when I see the woman hang up the telephone at the front of the house. I glance down the other way, down the hall back towards the kitchen, and see the back door begin to open, the leading edge of the Reverend’s receding hair line framed there. Things are about to get tricky. I forget to breathe.

  My heart starts up a crazy tattoo, blood in my ears, in my eyes. There’s that twinge again, like I’ve pulled a muscle along my ribcage, like Carmen is trying to warn me things are going bad, bad, bad. What am I going to do?

  The woman is closer to me but her back is still turned.

  I have maybe five minutes before one of them returns to find me frozen here at the foot of their bed, like a person turned to stone, or salt. I have to move. But where to?

  And how? Will I make it past the wife if I run? Or will she intercept me at the door, hold Carmen’s slight frame 77

  easily until her husband gets there, the police arrive?

  I can’t be seen here. I can’t be seen here. Carmen is in enough trouble.

  Then something strange happens.

  ‘Esther!’ I hear the man shout loudly. ‘I need your help. In the kitchen, hurry.’

  The woman swings around wide-eyed, runs past my hiding place, down the passageway, responding blindly to the terrible fear in her husband’s voice.

  Before I know I am moving, I have sprinted up the hall in the opposite direction, towards the front door, have flung it wide open. For a moment, I look back and see the woman stop and turn in confusion, the man turn in surprise from the act of shutting and locking the kitchen door beyond her, holding a steel bat in one hand.

  And I see it. He can’t have spoken. He hasn’t even seen me until now.

  ‘What are you doing? Get her!’ he roars, pointing beyond his disconcerted wife at me.

  She blusters, ‘But you just said for me to —?’

  And I slam the front door behind me in their shocked faces, dodging falling pieces of flaming pine as I run like I have never run before. Everything finally working together, as if Carmen and I have become a 78

  single organism at last.

  I did that.

  I did that.

  Three blocks away, the knowledge takes the air out of my lungs and I sit down hard on the edge of someone’s driveway, legs trembling.

  Behind me, a red glow lights up the distant skyline.

  The whole tree, as tall as a small apartment block, must be in flames now, and in the distance I can hear fire engines drawing closer. I need to make it back to Ryan’s place before someone spots Carmen Zappacosta wandering the streets of Paradise with ashes in her curling hair. But I can’t seem to move.

  What else am I able to do? What else have I forgotten about myself?

  It is only when I finally get to my feet that I see him.

  Standing across the road like a silent reproach, looking directly at me. He doesn’t make a move in my direction.

  Nothing about him ind
icates anger, or sorrow, or even interest. He just wants me to see him, to know he is there. Or maybe he has been there all along and only now have I begun to perceive him. His right hand rests upon the hilt of a sword, the blade of which is lost in 79

  his raiment of white. In his left palm is cupped a living flame.

  And he could be brother to my true self, he could be my twin. I recognise the same features that greet me in the mirror. The same thick, straight, perfectly even brown hair, worn a little too long for fashion, the brown eyes. He is very tall. Pale. Classical looking. Broad-shouldered. Quite beautiful, taken all together. Like a living statue. Not Luc, but yet so like Luc in the way he holds himself, his bearing, his essential nature, that Luc, too, could be his brother.

  What are they?

  The thought rocks me suddenly with an impact like a small bomb.

  What are we?

  Ryan got it right when he tried to explain it earlier.

  Light seems to seep from the stranger’s skin, as if he is made of it. As if he’s some kind of being of pure fire. In robes so luminously white, I can’t make out the detail.

  I look down at myself, and the illumination I shed into the chill night air is like a poor imitation, a mere shadow of the light cast by the burning man standing on the opposite verge.

  I take a step towards him, pass a hand across my 80

  eyes — in apology? Supplication?

  And, like that, he is gone.

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  Chapter 10

  Ryan steps out of the shadows outside the Charltons’

  place. For a moment, I don’t know who he is, because grief has made me punch-drunk.

  I don’t recall the walk back. I have raked the faulty show reel that is my memory for any recollection of the gleaming youth who is like my male double. There is nothing there but darkness, and no one to ask, and the thought fills me with despair. I have never felt more alone. Suddenly I realise the value of what I might have lost, and it is legion.

  Who am I? What am I capable of?

  ‘What took you so long?’ Ryan says worriedly, lifting one hand towards me.