Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘This your car?’ one of the kids shouted.

He didn’t answer. He could hear sirens whooping on Ocean Avenue. Weee-ooo Weee-ooo Weee-ooo. They’d be arriving any moment. He turned and made off in the direction of the project.

He ran up a flight of stairs and along a walkway, putting solid concrete between himself and his burning car. He glanced up once and saw the boy with the crewcut and the puffy eyes standing on a balcony above him.

The boy shouted something.

He didn’t hear it the first time.

The boy shouted it again. ‘Where’s your hat, mister?’

When Nathan woke in the morning, the bed was empty. Through the open door he could hear Reid talking.

‘You know what they say about evidence.’ A pause. ‘They say destroy it.’ Another pause. ‘I thought I’d do a friend a favour, that’s all.’

He could hear no second voice. It must be a phone-call. He eased out of the bed and pulled on his jeans. In the lounge the sun pressed against the drawn blinds. A few bright ribs of light thrown on the floor.

‘Why don’t you look out the window?’ Reid said, and then he hung up.

Strange way to end a phone-call.

Reid put the phone down with a smile. When he looked up and saw Nathan standing in the doorway the smile remained. Or rather, the shape of the smile remained. The content had altered. Where the first smile had been poisonous, the second was benign. And the transition was so effortless, so deft. Nathan knew he was supposed to be smiling back, but found that he could only stare.

‘I’d almost forgotten you were here,’ Reid said.

‘How could you forget?’ Nathan murmured. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was joking.

He watched as Reid rose from the sofa and moved towards him. He closed his eyes. He felt one gloved hand brush the hair back from his forehead.

‘You time things just right,’ he said.

He felt one gloved finger trace the outline of his top lip.

‘Like when you called me,’ he said. ‘Last night. On the street.’

Then he heard Reid’s voice, close to his ear: ‘I’m going to take you somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere special.’

Nathan opened his eyes again. Part of the wall seemed to move behind Reid’s shoulder and a second man moved across the room towards them. Nathan hadn’t even noticed him. But he must have been there the whole time. Must have heard them talk. Seen them touch.

He had a shaved head and mirror shades. An M-shaped vein pulsed high up on the left side of his forehead. Nathan looked at the man and saw himself twice.

‘This is McGowan,’ Reid said. ‘Otherwise known as the Skull.’ He laughed. ‘You can probably see why.’

The Skull tipped his head back a fraction.

Nathan nodded. He could see.

Putting his hand on the Skull’s shoulder, Reid steered him towards the door. Nathan went to the window. He picked up the binoculars and stared down at the promenade. He heard Reid say, ‘Me too,’ and then he heard the word, ‘Eight,’ then the door clicked shut. He watched a man and a boy playing football in the sunshine. The boy swung his leg and kicked the ball. The man trapped the ball and kicked it back again. The boy swung his leg again. This time he missed, the ball rolled past, he scampered after it. The man lay down on the bright grass. Nathan felt Reid behind him. Not a sound exactly. More like a displacement of the air.

‘Are you ready?’

Nathan put the binoculars down.

They took the elevator to the underground parking-lot. A black car crouched in the shadows on fat tyres. Nathan slid into the hard leather seat and pulled the door shut after him. It made that sound, he remembered it from before, somewhere between a crunch and a click. Such luxury in that sound.

But the unease was still with him. He felt robbed by that man’s presence in the apartment, and he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling. When he thought back he could sense the man gloating from the far side of the room. And then that supernatural moment when he detached himself from the wall and moved forwards.

‘Is something bothering you?’ Reid asked.

‘I didn’t see him,’ Nathan said.

Reid eased the car up the ramp and out into the sunlight. ‘I don’t follow you.’

‘That man,’ Nathan said. ‘I didn’t know he was there.’

‘Did it upset you?’

‘I just felt he saw everything.’

Reid reached for his dark glasses. ‘Well,’ he said with a smile, ‘there’s nobody to see us now.’

The knitting-needle click of the gears as he shifted into third for the slip-road that led to the expressway.

‘We’ll be there soon. You should take this.’ He passed Nathan a white capsule.

‘You really think I need it?’

Reid shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. It might relax you.’

‘I don’t know whether I want to relax.’

‘Please yourself.’

Nathan closed his hand around the capsule. He held it in his fist like a dice he might throw.

‘Where we’re going,’ he said, ‘is there a phone?’

Reid looked across at Nathan. ‘Where we’re going,’ he said, ‘there’s a phone with fish inside it.’

This brought a smile to Nathan’s face. He shook off his misapprehensions. Put the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

The car skated across three lanes, one crisp diagonal at eighty miles an hour, fast lane to slow. Out through Exit 6: Moon Beach East. In five minutes they were passing under a pale-blue archway. White letters on the curving crossbar: THE OCEAN BED MOTEL.

‘You been here before?’ Reid asked him.

Nathan shook his head. ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

You approached the motel from above, along a road that snaked through a landscape of spindly palms and boulders. It was a pale-blue building, two storeys high. There were waves on the roof, sculpted out of poured concrete. It looked like a cross-section of the ocean.

While Reid registered, Nathan looked round. There was a strong smell of seaweed in the lobby. This, he soon found out, was emanating from the motel restaurant where Today’s Special was Charbroiled Shark Steak with Hot Seaweed Salad. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble with the décor. There were racks of pink coral and treasure chests half buried in drifts of sand. There was dim, fathoms-down lighting. There were bits of ships lying about, rusting. The ocean bed. Replace the air with water and you’d be there.

‘What do you think?’ Reid asked him.

But he couldn’t answer. The drug was beginning to rush through him now and he was finding it hard to distinguish reality and hallucination. For instance: he was seeing mermaids everywhere. Cascades of blonde hair, bodies sheathed in silver scales from the waist down. Mermaids. There was something he ought to be doing, but it was as if he had his ear to a shell: he could hear the sea and all his other thoughts escaped him.

He saw the car that he’d left on the promenade. He saw it in detail — a city map on the dashboard, the groceries on the back seat. It had been there for at least twenty-four hours. The milk would be sour by now, he thought.

They were following a mermaid down dark-blue corridors with dark-green doors. Her sequins chinked and glittered.

She touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hear that?’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Listen.’

He listened. It sounded like doors being opened very slowly. Or the noise people make when they stretch. ‘What is it?’ he asked her.

‘It’s whales,’ she said. ‘It’s for atmosphere.’

Reid turned to him and smiled.

He keeps doing that, Nathan thought. Turning and smiling at me. Running his eyes over me like hands.