Rebecca Lim - Mercy

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 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.

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.’

‘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 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.

‘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.

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 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.’ Ryan’s mouth compresses 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.