Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Sister pushed through some swing doors that were muffled, like her shoes, in black rubber. Everything about her was precise, hygienic. If she ever farted, he thought, it’d probably sound like someone slipping a note under a door.

‘Nearly there,’ she said.

They pushed through more swing doors and entered a long room with a wooden floor. There were ten beds on either side and bars on the windows. The air smelt faintly of ether.

‘Second bed from the end on the right,’ the Sister said. ‘Are you a relative?’

‘I’m a colleague. We used to work together.’

She nodded. ‘If you need me, I’ll be in the office.’

‘Thank you, Sister.’

Jed stood beside the bed, looking down. Vasco lay with his arms resting on top of the blankets, his hands loosely clenched. Those chunky rings he used to wear had been removed. But there was nothing anyone could do about the tombstones: two rows of blue tattoos that ran all the way from his shoulders to his wrists. And there was one, Jed remembered with a shiver, that covered almost the whole of his back. His eyes jumped to Vasco’s face. Masklike. All the blood seemed to have drained from his skin, and his hair, still black, looked stiff, fake.

Jed sat down. ‘Hey, Vasco,’ he said, ‘remember me?’

Vasco stared at the ceiling.

Jed shifted his chair closer to the bed. ‘It’s Jed,’ he whispered. ‘You know, Spaghetti. The ugly one.’ He leaned closer still, spoke right into Vasco’s ear. ‘So fucking ugly, I’m hardly human.’

There was a murmur at his shoulder. He looked round. An old man stood behind him, clutching a hymn book. The old man’s pyjamas had come undone and Jed could see his penis dangling like a piece of gristle in the gap.

‘He ain’t going to talk to you,’ the old man said.

Jed frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s been here five years. He ain’t talked to nobody.’

Jed turned away from the old man. Thinking back, he could remember other times when Vasco had seemed to go missing inside himself. On the mudbanks of the river once. Then that morning when they stood in the place where Scraper had been killed. And again the night they torched the construction site in Meadowland. It hadn’t mattered then: he’d always come back. This time, though, he’d gone further. Further than ever before.

Jed bent close to his friend. ‘I should’ve listened to you. You were doing the right thing. You were just clumsy, that’s all.’

He sat back. Dinner at Vasco’s house. A three-car garage, a flagpole on the lawn, a wife. Too many distractions. Vasco had tried to warn him that night, and he’d ignored it. He’d thought Vasco was being dramatic. But the drama only came later, when Vasco sold the story to the papers.

He bent close again. ‘That story you leaked, it never would’ve stuck.’ He shook his head. ‘You must’ve been crazy to try and pull something like that.’ He bent closer still. ‘You should’ve asked me, Vasco. I always had ideas. We could’ve done it together.’

No, no. That was just dream talk. He’d already been drawn into Creed’s magnetic field by then. He never would’ve taken sides against Creed. ‘Listen, Vasco. I want to bring him down. I want to break him. But I need your help. You helped me before. A couple of times. You can do it again. We can get him, but we’ve got to move now. It’s our last chance.’ He eased back slowly, hands braced on his knees. He waited. But Vasco wasn’t even there. Jed looked down. He didn’t know what else he could say.

‘You’re not the first one who’s tried.’

Jed spun round. It was the old man again. The old man took a step backwards, sniggered. ‘Others’ve tried, don’t make no difference.’

‘Others?’

The old man nodded.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t make no difference who. He ain’t going to talk is all. Me, I talk up a storm. Don’t get enough time for what I got to say. But him,’ and he pointed at Vasco with his hymn book, ‘he ain’t got nothing he wants to say, not to nobody.’

Jed stared at Vasco. Sharon had told him a story once. It was one of her typical tall stories, it belonged with her magic bag. And yet it seemed to have come alive in his head, and he found that he could remember parts he didn’t even think he’d heard.

It was about a man who lived in a small village on the other side of the world. This man had a pig that he wanted to sell. On market day he set out for the nearby town, but as he reached the gates of the town he fell down dead. His family buried him in sacred ground, which was up a mountain, Jed remembered, past some big trees.

Not long after being buried, the man rose up out of his grave and shook the earth from his limbs and walked through the big trees, back into the village. He told his family that he’d had a dream. In the dream he’d appeared at the temple of the dead, but the god who guarded the gate had denied him entry. ‘You’re not ready yet,’ the god had told him. ‘You must go back.’

How did the story go on? Something about the man turning strange. Something about him sitting outside his hut and staring straight ahead as if there was nothing in front of him, nothing for miles. Jed’s eyes drifted down to Vasco, and he shivered.

At first the man’s family let him be, but they soon got scared. They asked the wise men what to do. The wise men couldn’t really help. They said that the man’s soul had left his body while he was lying in the ground, and now he was trapped between two lives, just waiting to die. It was then that the mother had an inspiration. ‘We must sell the pig,’ she said. If they sold the pig, her son would have his last desire, and maybe then he’d find peace.

She put the pig up for auction. There wasn’t much interest at first. A pig, after all, was only a pig. It wasn’t even a very succulent pig; if anything, Jed remembered, it was kind of scrawny. But, all of a sudden, rumours began to fly through the village and the surrounding countryside. There was a pig for sale. The pig had some kind of magic power. Whoever owned the pig would never die. People came from far and wide, the bidding soared.

By the time it was over, the pig had fetched a huge price. The mother went to tell her son the news, but when she touched him on the shoulder he toppled sideways. She didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. The family buried him again, and this time he stayed in his grave, and his body turned black and sank into the earth.

Jed looked into Vasco’s eyes. Maybe the same kind of story had happened here. Maybe Vasco had asked for death, and been turned away. And so he’d walked naked through the big trees, and now he was sitting outside his house, waiting for some god to call his name. Jed felt like one of the family: invisible and scared. Like the mother, he had to think of something. He had to try and change where Vasco was.

‘You recognise me, don’t you, Vasco?’ He was so close, he could smell the stale urine, the antiseptic. ‘I can’t believe you don’t recognise me.’

The old man touched Jed on the shoulder and Jed looked round. ‘You want to hear a song?’ The old man was already fumbling through the pages.

‘No,’ Jed said. ‘Just leave us alone.’

‘I found a good one.’ The old man was holding the hymn book in both hands and shifting hopefully from one foot to the other.

‘I said, leave us alone,’ Jed snapped.

The old man backed away across the ward, his eyes skidding on the floor, the hymn book dangling against his thigh like part of a broken limb.

Some of the anger was still with Jed when he turned back to Vasco. He’d tried everything and got nowhere. He could only think of one last way he might get through. He put his mouth close to Vasco’s ear.