PART ONE

I stood outside the grungy-looking doorway opposite the café staring at the handwritten flyer that was pinned to the right of the door, just below a row of battered stainless steel buzzers and a horizontal grille.

But somehow I had lost my sense of humour regarding the world; somewhere along the way it had been eaten up and spat out into the gutter.

People brushed against me as they passed by, some of them glancing at me disdainfully as I waited outside the entrance to the knocking shop. A woman sucked air through her teeth, averting her gaze; a couple of teenage Asian lads laughed and called out to me. I ignored them all and stared at the door. It was painted pillbox red and the old paintwork was bubbled and blistered, like diseased or badly sunburned flesh.

Immaculee Karuhmbi. It was an odd name; poetic and strangely beautiful. Foreign, obviously: perhaps African. There was a singsong quality to the name that made me think of tribal songs and the wide-open spaces and scrubland of a faraway veldt.

I turned my head and looked at the café I'd just left; it felt a million miles away, as if the main road were in fact an ocean separating me from that other place. The neon sign was bent and hung down further on one side, and the bulbs in the accent above the letter e had burned out. The owner didn't seem to mind such inattention to detail regarding his premises. It was just another thing that went wrong at some point, and nobody cared enough to put it right.

Turning back to face the scarred old building I was about to enter, I let out a small breath and wondered what the hell I was doing here. Why had I not just stayed in the stupid haunted house, sat tight, and ignored that damned clockwork voice on the telephone?

A small, quiet voice located somewhere at the back of my head, where all the primal hopes and fears were curled up into a tight little ball of anxiety, spoke softly to me, prodding me onwards.

The voice on the phone had sounded nothing at all like that of my dead wife – it had barely even sounded human: more an approximation of human tones. But still, there was always the chance, however slim, that it was her.

And wherever Rebecca was, I would also find Ally, our daughter. Wasn't this the only reason I was still alive, the single thing that had stopped me from ever ending my own life? The narrow hope that one day, in some way, I might see them again?

Recent betrayals of their memory aside – and even older ones craftily ignored – it was still the thing that drove me, the carrot I dangled ahead of myself just to help get me through the dark. Hope. That's what it was: blind hope. I had nothing else to cling to.

I stepped forward and rang the buzzer for the top floor. There was a burst of static, as harsh and unforgiving as a murder victim's scream, and then a voice cut through the din: "Hello?"

Again, there came a short explosion of static before the voice continued. "Do you have an appointment? Appointments only, I'm afraid." I could not tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman, but it was polite and direct and sounded like its owner would not take any crap.

"I…" I remembered the clockwork voice, and how it seemed to know everything – or even to be orchestrating things from the other end of a dead line. "Just tell her that Thomas Usher is here to see her. If she still won't accept my call, I'll go away."

This time the pause was longer, and it took me a few seconds to work out that the clicking sound I heard was probably the speaker being silenced as the person upstairs passed on my message.

"Come on up." Then, before the static could be heard again, the communication was ended and the door lock clicked loudly, allowing me to enter. I pushed open the old red door and stepped into a dimly lit passageway, with torn wallpaper on the damp walls and no carpet on the burnished floor. The floorboards creaked as I walked over them and the door eased shut behind me with only the slightest nudge from my hand.

The air was dense. Dust hung thick and heavy in the passage; a phantom cloud. The skirting boards along the base of the walls were coming loose, there were holes in the plaster and the floorboards had wide gaps between them. The place felt derelict, but I knew that people dwelled here: both the living and the dead, standing side by side like soldiers in some weird war against a common enemy yet to be identified.

Straight ahead was a closed door. There was a hatch set into the door at eye-level, but with no way of opening it from the outside. The door handle had been removed and the door had been hung in such a way that the hinges were hidden.

I hadn't noticed at first but in the wall at the foot of the stairs was a strange little cubby-hole, a sort of built-in cupboard with its door removed and with a tatty dining chair shoved into the space. Across the doorway, attached to each side of the frame, was a makeshift shelf or counter positioned at midriff level. Behind the shelf, sitting on the chair, was a wiry old man with badly drawn tattoos on his face. Behind him were crude shelves piled high with hand towels.

The old man grinned, flashing several yellow teeth and a lot of gaps in his blackened gums. "Fanny or phantoms?" He laughed, finding his question – which he had no doubt asked hundreds of times – hilariously funny.

"Top floor," said the old man, squinting at me. He licked his lips. His tongue was coloured an interesting shade of green. "Just keep climbing the stairs until you see a door covered in a load of African shit – that's the one you want." He laughed again. Spittle flecked the air in front of his wizened face. He raised a hand to scratch at his inky, monkey-like features. His fingernails were obscenely long, with dirt caked behind them.

"Thanks." I moved past him, keeping my distance. I felt that if I even entered his orbit I would be stained for life, dirtied beyond the hope of ever feeling clean again.

The man's laughter followed me up the first flight of stairs, and then suddenly stopped when I reached the narrow half landing, where the stairs turned abruptly to take me to the first floor. It was as if an invisible hand had reached out and snatched his mirth away, silencing him forever.

I passed a series of doorways on the first floor landing, giving them not much more than a cursory glance. I'd been to places like this before, in my former role as a paid guide to the departed. Once, a few years ago, I'd helped rid a Bradford massage parlour of a particularly nasty spirit – an unknown murder victim who claimed to be an early study of the Yorkshire Ripper, when he was still not much more than an inchoate serial killer.

I climbed the stairs to the upper level, noticing that the décor improved as I made my way up through the building. The second floor landing was blocked off by yet another door, with another grille set into the wall. I reached out and pressed the button. This was clearly the door to which the old bastard downstairs had referred: the wooden surface was decorated in attention-grabbing African designs, probably hand-painted by whoever took up residence on the second floor. Some of the motifs were gorgeous and some were scary and brutal.

A buzzer sounded; the door mechanism clicked and the door popped open an inch. I pushed the door wide and passed through, then shut it quietly behind me. The air was fresh and breezy; there must have been a window open somewhere. I could smell freshly cut flowers.

"This way, please." Now that I could hear the voice firsthand, I realised that it belonged to a young woman or girl. She stepped out of an open doorway to my left, and smiled. She was young – not much more than a teenager – and breathtakingly pretty. Coffee-coloured skin, remarkably pale eyes, bright white teeth. Her long, plaited hair was partially covered by a brightly-coloured scarf and she was wearing what looked like some kind of tribal dress. It was all earthen colours and swirling patterns. Beautiful.

"Hello." I smiled. It felt good to smile. Natural. I realised that I hadn't smiled like that in a long time.

"Hello, Mr Usher." She stepped forward and held out a thin brown hand. I took it, and almost kissed it before realising that all she was expecting was a polite handshake. The girl's beauty had knocked me for six.

"Miss Immaculee has been expecting you. They told her you were coming." Her teeth were so very white, like shards of bone, and her strange eyes were… hypnotic. "Please come this way."

"Who told her I was coming? I don't understand?" I was now speaking to the girl's back as she led me through the doorway and into a large, dim room. She was walking barefoot, and for some reason that seemed incredibly erotic.

The walls of the room were hung with thin drapes, and each one depicted some kind of African scene. They were marvellous examples of tribal art, and I wondered if they were simply there for show or held some kind of mystical association.

"Hello, Mr Usher." The voice which beckoned me deeper into the room was low and husky. I expected to see an aging male blues singer and not a middle-aged psychic woman.

The young girl left my side, walked to the door, and exited the room. She closed the door silently behind her; it seemed like a practiced move. The darkness quivered; the low lights trembled.

The woman sat in a high-backed chair at a highly polished table. She too had her hair wrapped up in a scarf, and several black tendrils hung down over her shoulders. Her eyes were large and deep and almost black. Her lips were full. Her cheeks were narrow, showing off her delicate bone structure. Her skin glowed. She had no arms.

I didn't want to stare, but what else could I do? She was wearing a white open-necked blouse with the arms pinned back and had an elaborate necklace at her throat. Her breasts were large and her shoulders were broad. And she had no arms.

I sat down at the table, facing her across its shiny surface. There was a glass set in front of the woman, with a long straw sticking out above the rim. She bent her head and took a sip. The drink had no aroma that I could detect; I thought it might be vodka. "Can I get you anything, Mr Usher?" I liked the way she said my name. Her eyes widened; she drank me in like the vodka, plucking me from my seat and examining what she found, rolling me around on her tongue.

"What brought you here, if you don't mind me asking? Did someone give you my name, or was it a dream?" Her direct manner was alarming in some ways yet comforting in others. At least I didn't have to play games with this woman.

I decided to get to the point: "Somebody spoke to me on the telephone and told me to seek you out. I have no idea who this person was – or even if it was a person. Do you understand what I mean by that?"

She nodded once. Her eyes caught the light. They shone like dark stones brought up from the depths of a vast black lake.

"I was told to come here but I don't know why. I'm being as honest with you as I know how. Can you help me? Do you even know what I'm talking about?" I leaned forward and into the edge of the table, pressing my elbows against the wood.

"I lost my arms in 1994, Mr Usher. Do you recall, by any chance, the Rwandan Genocide? I was – I am – a Tutsi. My village was attacked by Hutus armed with knives and machetes. They did not think us worthy of wasting bullets." She paused; I waited. A clock ticked loudly somewhere in the room. I hadn't noticed it until now. "They hacked to death my husband and daughter, right in front of me. They raped my daughter first, as I watched. Then they chopped her to pieces."

"I thought you must have – that's why the voices chose me to deliver the message. Because we are joined in a way, by our loss."

"Those men – those Hutu murderers – they raped me amid the remains of my loved ones. Then they urinated on me. Finally, they cut off my arms and left me to bleed. They thought I would die there, surrounded by pieces of my family. I remember their laughter as they walked away, drinking beer and boasting of how I'd enjoyed it."

The clock had stopped; all the clocks had stopped. I could hear the screams of the murdered and feel the tears of the innocent. My skin burned; fires raged around me. My tattoos danced. There was a ringing in my ears that could only be a distant scream.

"But I didn't die. Oh, no; I survived. They took my family and they cut off my arms, but what I got in return was the voices. They come back to me – my loved ones. They come back and they tell me things, but only when I am asleep. Only in my dreams…"

I felt like screaming. This woman had been through so much. It wasn't fair, wasn't right. Why must she continue to suffer?

"I sleep a lot. Young Traci tends to me. She gives me gin and vodka to ease my nerves and cooks me wonderful meals I rarely eat."

I realised that the glow I had noticed earlier on her skin was the radiance of death. It was not far away now; she was preparing and praying for it to arrive quickly. Her intense bright-burning presence, the torn and ragged voice. Was it cancer? In her throat?

"Two nights ago another voice entered my dreams. One I had not heard before. It was… mechanical, somehow. Like a windup toy. It told me to pass on an address." She leaned forward, her motion smooth and silent and horrific. I hated myself for being afraid, but I was. I was terrified.

"She said you must go to the river. There is a place, a warehouse: number 3, Dock Side. I don't know where exactly, but it is in London." She gasped for breath, but when I reached out to her across the table she pulled away, baring her teeth. "Not to touch. You mustn't touch – no one ever touches me again." Then, as if nothing had occurred, she smiled. It was a sweet smile, almost ethereal in its delicateness.

"Was there anything else, or was it just the address?" I blinked rapidly, feeling tears that would not come. My eyes were dry, but they were aching. I wished that I was able to cry, just this once.

"Yes. There was another thing – something important. She told me to repeat it word for word." The psychic bent forward at the waist, sipped her drink.

She straightened in her chair, and I experienced the full force of her savage dignity, her refusal to break. Here was a proud woman, a strong woman, who had refused to give up. Yes, she was damaged and she drank too much, but she was alive – she was present. She was not a ghost. Not yet.

"The voice said: 'Stay away from her. Even if she finds you, stay away. You cannot help. She is lost to you, even though you think you have found her.'" She slumped in her chair, as if by speaking the words she had exhausted herself. "That is all." She looked down at the table. I stared at the small mounds of her stumps under the shirt; they were like absurd misplaced breasts.

I stood up, feeling nauseous, and backed away from the table. Fumbling in my pocket I produced a few notes and threw them onto the tabletop. "Thanks," I mumbled. I could barely even speak.

"No charge," she said, without looking up. The room seemed darker now, as if a veil had been drawn across the window.

I turned and I hurried out of the room, leaving the money were it had fallen. The young girl, Traci, was sitting cross-legged on the landing, a dented stainless steel bowl held between her bare knees, and skinning some kind of root vegetable with a small knife. She was humming a strange tune as she worked, and when she looked up at me I finally realised that she was blind.

TEN